Baudelaire wrote no detective story because, given the structure of his instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the detective. In him, the calculating, constructive element was on the side of the asocial and had become an integral part of cruelty.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Coímbra, Portugal.
The slow drip of a Sunday complaint on the fourteenth day of January 1894 fell drop by drop with faint determination from the roof to my numbered door. Rosaries of rain running into braids of guttered music; downpipes of depression, smells of fungus. More:
Tomorrow I will leave my father’s house lugging two small suitcases into the tumid tram smelling of horse, eyes cast down to run the obstacle course of half-digested oats, while up above, dark faces at the greasy glass will grin at my discomfort. The air is thick with garlic and ripe overcoats. I garner no empathy. I’m from a line with an ancient deformity. Just five feet high and hydrocephalic. Family lore has it that we will always be granted one concession to beauty, unfortunately always illegitimate… that’s the fee.
The Conceição Concession hasn’t fallen upon me.
Leaving home finally. I did not want my mother there. Her position was not one that was justified by marriage, instead she would have been out of place in her condition, amongst my father’s friends and colleagues who were milling about the carriage. They sent me off in style, gave me money to continue my studies; even as a junior magistrate I did my father proud and he held me saying, ‘Sonny come back soon’. Then there was Hannah, my good friend’s sister, letting herself be kissed for the first time on the mouth, my heart all aflutter, her hard lips when she whispered I would be missed. Suddenly my mother appeared in her shabby dress crying aloud, her face a mess of tears and mud from the potatoes she had been peeling. My father had already turned away and disappeared into the crowd which pretended not to see what I had always feared – her imploring hands, her trembling prayer reeling between novenas. I placed some money in her hands, their backs still covered in farina, and saw her frown, and I ran for the horsedrawn tram, away from town, still hearing her exclamation: I bore him from my loins, and now he gives me coins. I am not proud of being amongst bad seeds which have sprung unplanned in life’s dark row, but I shall not go down on hypocritical knees when my father has been my foe.
I sit in the carriage like a mouse with cheese and watch schoolgirls on my corner wave goodbye to me, giggling at the lawyer’s son they knew was a bastard without beauty. The next century will be lit beneath a darkling sky and young brides who fasted for their wedding day will play their games reciting my verses (those which lasted), rung by rung, performed with a mocking bow: Camilo Conceição – a poet by any other name would sound as bad when sung with rhymes conceived in shame. Didn’t you know his father had laid a coloured parlourmaid?
1
He was making for Paris, his face covered in soot – he kept sticking his head out of the train window on the way to marvel at the countryside. He had not seen such vast and open fields, endless rivers and hunched artists examining their easels in seas of lavender. His father’s house in Coímbra looked out on rainy hills of habitation so the eye fell short, upon suits, umbrellas, a tight-laced bourgeoisie all smelling of wet newspaper. Nor did he like their town house in Lisbon, for there he could hear worms creeping in the night in his father’s books. The laws of torts and taxation succumbed to their appetite.
In Paris the population glided on fumes: of alcohol, dead flowers and opium which he had smelt only once, when the dentist took out a tooth of his and later he had negotiated the streets in a swoon. He could never really sleep. It was just a lingering. Close to corruption. He wanted to dislocate himself in a way that brought a deeper past, completely to transform himself into another, and was convinced this other lay buried in China. Just the mere mention of a place name and he was compelled to travel there: Marseilles, Morocco, Manchuria. He would work at all kinds of jobs. He would become frenzied, unstoppable. China. It was whence all flowers came. He could smell its poetry.
The fragment of the Portuguese self he carried within him was embalmed in dead law-books. It did not rise to the living world because it had no great tradition, only small-minded precedence. He was convinced his sleeplessness was a sign of something else awakening, something from a bottomless sea, an ancient vessel surfacing, upon which he would wander the world to find all the grand connections. Camilo Conceição: poet. The soughing of waves; the sloughing of sails. Stow it. Others would say such windy passions could only have been conceived by a defective mother suffering from hysteria. The tides, the moon. Conceição soon bore his father’s symptoms: popping eyeballs, a restricted field of vision. He felt no pain in parts of his body…he could stick needles into his tongue…but his nether regions were hypersensitive and disruptive, calmed only by warm baths, one brush upon that fleecy place and Vesuvius erupted. He was untouched so far by women or philosophers on their daily path. He felt; he touched; if only.
Church
From an early age – I think I was six or seven – I cursed the Infinite for allowing me into the world. Not God, for he was a white-beard resting in heaven, in a storm-tossed cloud steadied by archangels, old man, cape furled, not at peace, ranting at the wingèd youth who sheathed bright swords upon the words of maidens. I cursed Time for bringing me this moment, in which I was cast out from heaven’s beauty. Look, I am a centaur. My short hairy legs will carry me far.
The Renaissance ceilings in the cathedral of my childhood in Coímbra. I mistook them for legitimacy, authority, the inheritance of deep feelings; believed such art demonstrated my crime of being born outside the law. The world was full of exquisite cherubs. My countless faintings at High Mass were proof not of low blood sugar but of a flaw, something interlinear – an impure strain which anarchists bore, their thirst to scatter incense and explosives; I fainted before fanaticism, which opened its thighs to receive me – intensely, purely, obscenely. At Mass I cursed.
Unsurprising therefore I read Virgil, he who lived between two ages and doubted poetry’s false scheme to line up beauty and reality. I was on a different search, not for rhyme but for the reason why the Renaissance thought a discovery of perspective gave it a superior view. I preferred Chinese art. I saw their porcelain vases in a local museum. They were fragile picturepalaces and distance was neither here nor there, a discovery given only to the few.
2
His mother’s name was Pereira. It meant pear tree. Stable enough. Humble roots. She became his governess as they moved from town to town and as his father grew in importance, little Camilo began wearing boots. He did not find out she was his mother until he was ready to leave home. She told him she always wanted to be married under a pear tree. Not realising she was his mother, he did not see anything strange in this wish. Her moment to be free.
Here he is: an indifferent pupil. A C-grade student. A short teenager walking with a stoop, the world too heavy for his four feet and ten inches. In Coímbra, a rainy old city, he attends university, writes sad poems about dawns and twilights and shows the first signs of clinical depression. Life, he writes to his friend Alberto Osório de Castro, was simply a matter of getting through time. He alternates between the past and the future and develops a fear of the present tense, which he associates with a miasma suppurating above the water pump in the square at night: a fog; now-time: time to go; those moments that have already embalmed their nostalgia. The sickness of his sadness.
Conservative and rebellious, seething between self-importance and low self-esteem, he betrays no other talent than that of following his father, a judge. He enters law school in Coímbra but is not gifted enough in that direction. He will not attain that indifferent dream of his to argue in the high court, to expound matters of state waving a large white handkerchief sprinkled with eau d’Issy to an audience of visiting jurors. His ideas of republicanism are cloudy with naïve romance. As a probationary notary in Óbidos, he is suspended between births, marriages and deaths. No entry of a birth, marriage or death is without a raft of stories; that is, without deception. By deception he also means disappointment: love is not a real emotion; issue is quite without the balance of the law. Something going seriously wrong inside his head. Once a week he takes a walk to the baths at Buçaco, where there are green hills and gardens and there he pays for a rub-down by a hoary attendant. Payment is his requital.
When he moves to the district court, he does not wish to call himself an advocate, avocado, that strange green Inca fruit known also as alligator pear, reminding him of his governess which he would never call Mother, even when she lay dying after the doctors extracted a weighty stone from her gall bladder. He is not interested in advocacy, but in provocation. Something growing inside him, a poisonous seed.
In the newspaper room of the Club de Recreio he reads about the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta, whose manifesto declared that the insurrectionary deed is the most efficacious means of propaganda. He is secretly thrilled that this mindless advocacy of violence has made its way into the clubroom. He points out the headlines to his colleagues. Horrors have an enchanting effect on him. It is not yet cocktail hour, but most of the clubmen are already drunk. They snort at the news. The eponymous Malatesta is not sick in the head. He is a product of rag-pickers and that is why he has the capacity to act, Conceição says. The others are bewildered. Such rapacity. They will consider banning Camilo from the club. Before the new century gets into stride, anarchists will have assassinated President Sadi Carnot of France, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy and President McKinley of the USA, Conceição prophesies.
He brought suspicion upon himself. An ironic grin appeared beneath his black beard; little white teeth; canary eggs. He probably belonged to the Carbonária. He was a republican; secretive. His hand gestures, when he illustrated his views, were coded signals. Perhaps the clubmen should have had this Conceição investigated. In any case, he was reading a poem by a Charles Baudelaire. Now that was someone worth prosecuting, they concurred; a communard, no doubt. Conceição swallowed his cognac and lit his cigar. In times of terror everybody is a detective, he said. He neglected to finish saying what he was thinking: that a poet, in times of terror, was first and foremost a whore, writing anything that provoked requital.
Pancreatic Paris
Desperation. Finding lodgings.
I will pay, I can tell, for having treated my boring but comfortable life with such contempt.
I drink too much in compensation.
I did not want to hold up a deep mirror to the world, reflecting common perversities.
I did not want to say: On a cold afternoon in the Hotel Californie, Miss Edith Wharton encountered Mr. Henry James on the carpeted landing.
Or that something was terribly wrong. That there was a dog turd on the rug. Left there by the fireside spaniel. Nothing alarming; not as if there were no fish left in the sea.
I had a deep hatred of novels, those embellishments of the bourgeoisie. Little commodities they took home in order to fry a frisson from an insecure world.
I had borrowed some of my father’s money…about half of what he held in a strongbox behind his books. He was back from work, wet with rain, and he reached in and notes were falling like washed lettuce leaves from his hand and he gave me his blessing. My friend Alberto Osório de Castro loaned me the rest. At the Freemasons meeting we secretly said goodbye. Touching.
There was a frozen dog turd on the carpeted landing.
I was in Paris and the first call I made, after a couple of glasses of wine, was to one of Baudelaire’s dirty haunts – he changed addresses 27 times in one year – then I rented a room on the Île Saint-Louis near the Hôtel Pimodan to study what Baudelaire would have done behind the frosted glass in a chamber of that club with hardly any furniture, just couches upon which he participated in ‘fantasias’.
Baudelaire wrote with a red goose quill. Hardly anything else on the table if there was a table. When the bailiffs took his bed he wrote on his lap, sitting on a chair made by his stepfather, with most of the stuffing gone, the material threadbare. His stomach groaned. Outside, all Paris was a digestif. It flowed with absinthe. In combat with his circumstances, he was tormented most by his clock. One o’clock: there will be no lunch. Six o’clock: no dinner. He lay comatose most of the time on the floor in order to conserve his energy for writing. He unscrewed the glass from the clock, ripped off the hands. Then he wrote on its face: It is later than you think. He wanted to travel to China. Hashish: his invitation to voyage.
My neighbour’s cat slinks into my room. I remember something I wrote a year before when I haunted the museum in Coímbra…how the Chinese can tell the time from a cat’s eyes. I pick up the cat, stare into its pupils. Light reveals horror and night yields secrets. It is still before midday. In the present. Claws. What would the Chinese have done now? With this perpetual midday which never arrives? Sharp as a scar? A memory: I may have been Chinese; a grey Taoist day, on a beach somewhere near Figuiera da Foz; staring at a woman baring her breasts; her accusation; my smallness.
At the age of twenty-one, Camilo Conceição had not had any love affairs. Of course there were those little flutters of the heart, the flirtations which flattered him when all the girls were just taking on a dare, testing their resistance to revulsion against his ugliness. Always second-guessing. He had these big soft dark eyes with the lashes of an angel. There were further cruelties, but he took them as normal in the course of becoming a man, so he thought. One wistful, freckly nymphet allowed him to touch her nipples, little cherries which were no different from a boy’s. At school, boys did the ‘nipple-squeeze’ to each other as a form of ambush. He wasn’t sure if he should. Then there was Fernanda, who allowed him to court her when he came home from the university. It was like having a plump companion for whom you had to make allowances. He believed he lost his selfpity during this period, not his virginity.
And finally there was the prostitute Delicia, who hated kissing, and after the first embrace during which he was premature, still fully dressed, he could not wait to save up enough for her and thought he would marry her and rescue her from such a life, teach her how to osculate, and it was only when he walked in on her with another man, a bald and tattooed worker undoing his undershorts while she lathered his muscled thighs with salivary smackers, that he decided he would not entertain romanticism ever again.
In the streets they were staring at him. In the church they saw the black patch of sin pinned above his heart. Sooner or later punishment would come. A failure at his law exams. No reply to an acrostic poem he sent Matilda, the beautiful secretary belonging to his father’s colleague; deceitful Matilda who teased him by telling him that if only he would wait, he may have a chance…not today, not tomorrow, but soon…only to hear his father whispering to her one evening that his son was probably an invert.
His ears continued to grow; not the appendages of a bourgeois, more like a peasant’s. He did not know how he got such lugs. Maybe they were pencil-rests. He should have grown his hair long; collected paintings.
Sunday, Again
Emptiest day of the Lord.
Latecomer. Following the trail of Charles Baudelaire. Tail him like a ratcatcher in my grey greatcoat. He had to kill too; precursors like Lamartine, Musset, Hugo. Kill nature as they represented it. Portray Paris awash with grief and joy. He was intent on murder. Demolitions of buildings. Boulevards widened with dynamite. An underground rail network. A dull booming on the hour. They even blew up the cemeteries to make openings into the Underworld right next to department stores that opened their doors to a heaven awash with light. You hurry past at night. By day the white ray of progress plays tricks. You smoke a sticky jelly in your pipe. Achieve trompe-l’oeil effects. Buildings veering from side to side. Clocks melting. On Haussmann’s new avenues they drape tarpaulins so all will be revealed on the opening day; shrouded graves for resurrection. In the sky, clouds are simmering. Soulful recollections of a grander past. He hated such above-ground landscapes, preferring the smells of coffee, fish and urine. Then the sulphurous rain.
When I first read Baudelaire I said to myself I was finished with poetry. Now I was reading him again, standing at one end of the Pont Neuf waiting for my eyeglasses from an optician on the Quai Mégisserie wondering about the book I had intended to write in Coímbra on town planning in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, looking up from reading Les Fleurs du mal, I saw his double. Yes, unmistakably Baudelaire, with that tic in his walk as though he was fencing with an unseen foe, the dark scowl, the coal-black eyes which burned into me. He raised a forefinger and then looked away, saying: You are buggered by your leisure time, just like the rest of them!
I took that as a warning. The world was in production – arcades and emporia filled with pinstriped suits and spats, and I was searching for a cat which could be my timepiece, cornering Baudelaire for me finally and for all time. That cat had seen the devil.
4
The world was crude. You could say that from the moment Camilo Conceição was born, the world was already too abrasive. Being tossed out onto a towel like that. His skin too sensitive. A shade too dark for the ruling class, yet he sunburned easily when his father took him to the beach at Porto. His governess, Miranda Pereira, rubbed oil into his back and he howled with pain. Oil rubs out the darkness, she said. When he grew older he was forever running from crowds. Something about their darkness. Men on street corners reading newspapers; who stuck out their legs when he passed. It was the way you treated a dog, a charmless runt who could do no better than stack boxes at the fish markets. His father said crowds were like that: the crowd mentality was the mentality of the country. But how to whiten his skin?
His father said his skin was sensitive. What was sensitivity?
He was about nine when he discovered it. An emperor in a long indigo gown. There were cultures which prided themselves on sensitivity, achieved, it seemed, with barbaric cruelty.
Sensitivity was awareness, yet it was not consciousness. He discovered this when he was eighteen. Awareness was a predisposition to open up worlds backwards and forwards, worlds out of joint with the present one. Achieved without thinking.
Total frustration. But worlds backwards and forwards – they stored energy as well as trauma and left marks on him, little anxieties that he believed came via antiquity, an awareness, in other words, that had been filtered through generations; a nobility earned through war. These sensations came upon him slowly, like the cool mist of the evenings. Whenever he thought consciously of his state of consciousness he became a tough guy. Courtesy of those boots up the backside on street corners. He tried to be an irate tough guy, but all that surfaced was a tame gruffness which others thought a good bit of discipline would shake out.
To move through crowds was to be conscious of them, of their venality, the way they jostled, each worried about the day. How to get their hands on coin. It was madness, this pragmatic pushing. The bitter smell of brass.
He was at odds with anything called friendship. He willingly gave up friendship for solitude. Solitude allowed him to experience worlds fore and aft, fantastically and historically.
He made these notes and then made up his mind that he would take ship at Marseilles. He had to plot his course quickly. Time and tide were running, consuming life too thirstily; Paris overcome by vertigo, poised between a vague recollection of history and the next industrial revolution. He would have to slide down into a more ancient world, one which remained within the rhythms of the natural. Slowing down. Slipping under. A water plan.
Ocean
What if it turned out I’ve lost the small erotic thing which cost so much to buy on long afternoons drilling ash into spittoons lingering by the doors of department stores waiting for the scent of a particular woman?
What if it turned out I’ve come to the end of the rope of life, home to a frayed mortality, my empty room, the practicality of two pairs of shoes, six shirts in queues, waiting for love, success, any omen?
What if it turned out I’ve cast off a country which had given me a ballast of small minds, the comfort of class and weightless opinions passed by a king who wore a ring on his masculinity so there would be no question of his divinity – that I too, had spoken of his assassination?
What if it turned out I could never return to a summery girl, to her reckless churn of fluttering eyes and blonde deceit, that I had voted with my feet for a poorer world of weaker violence reaching China in my mind, through engulfing silence and sweet sickness, that with the swipe of an unexpected knife, sex subsided into the ocean? Do I want to go?
I wasn’t cut for revolution.
5
There was no summary girl, like an execution of his virginity. Instead, he met with some Portuguese republicans in Paris. The secret police had made some notes: that on the 4th of February 1894, Conceição met with Nado de Brito and Venceslau Almeida in the Café Poulidor in St-Germain. There were strange signs exchanged between them, though the agent, a Tenente Machado, could not quite describe them…a way of fingering a coat button, the rubbing of an eyebrow, a nod with a hand on the heart. As far as Machado could see, no written notes exchanged hands. There was a woman at the next table. She was dark, she could have been a gypsy wearing a mink hat, and she was writing furiously on a postcard. He edged his chair closer behind her, scraping it so loudly that the three conspirators grew alarmed and disappeared, one by one to the toilet. He looked over her shoulder; inhaled the fumes of her dark cigarette. Mused about her undergarments. Agent Machado could not read much English. He had hardly finished secondary school. But like a good secret policeman he took note of the address on the postcard by requisitioning it at the post office, and then made a few discreet enquiries with the receptionist at the hotel opposite, on the off-chance they knew something about the woman. Before long he was intercepting letters from a Julia Grace sent from Australia to a Miss Anna Ångström, poste restante, Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc.
Marseilles
Contestatory, in opposition, I strode down the rue Paradis. Massilia, founded by the ancient Greeks, it smelt of leeks. I came here to find a safe haven. Lunched on sardines and beans, found a girl and paid a fee. My first real experience. ‘Lavinia’ rose and fell, her pink blouse undone, smelling faintly of rosewater and sweat; they all wore pink; it was the colour of prostitution. I saw pink hills in collision with the sea. I saw pink-painted cottages against whose walls men preferred to urinate, beside the oyster stalls. Huîtres! Aqua-vita! Con! They seemed to be calling me. Last night I fought the Carthaginians in mellow smoke, and sided with Pompey until Caesar imposed harsh fines on fine wines. I wonder what my father would have thought of that. What was the real origin of taxes? The city was broke, then there were chimes: Marseilles proclaimed itself the first French republic in the thirteenth century and turned to manufacturing laundry soap. Cantankerously Catholic, it had a cottage industry and some hope. It opposed Henry IV until his conversion – he was such a dope he praised his own desertion. The city rebelled against Louis XIV. Its inhabitants heard the sun didn’t rise from his arse – his head fared worse – they joined the Revolution with their bottoms bared. Vive La Marseillaise. Bristling under the Terror, the city was subdued and razed. Blockaded because of Bonaparte, it supported the Bourbon Restoration. When Napoleon III regained the throne, Marseilles again became a republican zone, clandestine and contrary. Understanding its history, I was never happy on the rue Paradis. At dusk it was all blood. A russet sky. But see, there was always hashish and fish. I am Marseilles and Marseilles is me.
6
Conceição was on his way to take ship for the Far East. He was wandering around on the docks and they thought he wanted a boy for the night, but he was trying to see what it took to sign on as a sailor and on one ship where he requested to be considered as a squab, the whole crew laughed at him when he couldn’t even make it up a ratline to the first spar. Hopeless at everything, his father had told him. But he was rehearsing at life; that’s what he was good for; trying out everything to get the tone right; the halftones; snipped lines of experience; collisions and elisions. Caesurae smelt of unplied hemp, liaisons had tarry odours. He read Chinese and dreamt of courtesans and the smooth, taut cables of love, which stayed grammatical until the moment of orgasm, when tongues were untied, so he thought, in the gurgling of brooks, replications of centuries of sexual arts, vanishing points of perspective, man and woman undefined. He had no experience at all. That after love, a man sailed and schemed and grew hungry. He had to wait weeks before a suitable ship weighed anchor. One night he found himself sheltering under a stone bridge when a huge thunderstorm erupted. There was an old woman taking cover there, frightened out of her wits. He held her hands, spoke to her as he had never spoken to his mother. He said you could count the seconds between flash and thunder. Work out how fast danger was approaching. The old woman thought he was a priest. No, he said, a Freemason. So he would know about stone. Would the bridge be a safe place? Under it was fine, he said. He shared a piece of bread with her. She was so relieved she tried to give him love; embrace him. She had no teeth. He ran. He had no idea what was on her mind.
China
Sunday, December 1894. We set sail on a rusty vapour boat from Marseilles, a trading vessel smeared in oil, fumes forcing me up on deck in a soiled pea coat.
From time to time, with no appetite to spoil, out of sheer fatigue at sea-grey monotony, I repair below, edge to my cabin at the far end near the boiler room past the ‘temporary bar’ set up for six professors of botany, fellow travellers to the East. Specimens themselves behind salted glass, they feast on boiled eggs and beer, a plate of sardines for those lucky enough to have the money. I pass. I have no means and they have no pity. They guffaw at jellyfish specimens they’ve hung on the gunwale, dissecting them with razors, prodding at a tentacle, which like nettle, produces a sting. Men laugh when stung.
In the denser darkness of night-time swells, strange glitters erupt ahead; from deep arcades and infinite wells, black water heaves up jewellery from the dead…a glowing trail, ardenthya maritima, drowned souls making their frail way up to heaven. My crate of unread books wedged with tins of lima beans slides about beneath the bunk. I could drag this liferaft out before Cape Horn if the ship were sunk; or, hull holed by a pirate in the China Sea, I’ll defend the decks with Dostoevsky.
There is no self in my notes from the Underworld – an infinity of texts without a shelf; I have no essence, my mind still furled, becalmed mid-ocean, stricken by the notion of equality before the law. That was when I saw Macau, shimmering before the dripping bow and I, vowing to abolish the unsavoury practice of slavery, saw a mirage of dripping coolies and read the word ‘reform’ writ large upon my scroll. But they would perish with my first decree, before any legal punishment of owners could prevail. Chinese troops would mass on the fragile border and there would be no food for freedom-lovers. Only death brought reconciliation. All else a veil of compromise. It was the Chinese way, I’m told. And I, a puny Portuguese. The sea had turned metallic then, and slabs of swell formed into colours, a marbled collation of seaweed and debris as the steamer backed up and from the deep rose a phallic gush, a rush of foam, a flush of catacombs, blind dream of ancient bone, a resurrection! I, standing on principle while reading the Tao, both prince and disciple of the way, take on this heathensong, the excitement of indictment, rush to judgment, ravishing maidens, tight nights of gentle jig-a-jig beneath a crescendo moan, a ring of tiny offspring…born again, I, Judge Conceição, am here at the bow, to rule. Who could have been a better fool?
What Camilo Conceição called his ‘profane illuminations’ allows us to investigate how far he can deviate from the norm, playing God, before arriving at any reality principle warning of what could befall him in a strange land. The Procurador came to meet him at the wharf. It was raining steadily and had been raining for some days. The Procurador was a Creole, a Macanese, a halfcaste. The Procurador was supposed to be clever, doing things by halves, because the Chinese could overrun Macau at any moment, and as the Viceroy of Canton Li Hung-Chang said, if each of his soldiers threw their left shoe into the harbour there would be no harbour at all. Doing things by halves was enough to shift Nature itself. But because the Procurador did things by halves under this hypothesis, hardly anything got done at all, since he was supposed to mediate between the Portuguese authorities and the Chinese, and fearing the Chinese, but seeking gain from the Portuguese, he trod a fine line, and in the meantime, as an in-between man, a tightrope-walker, he made a lot of money just by balancing and doing nothing. But the reason why they said Procuradors were clever was because they spoke many languages. Camilo Conceição did not like the Procurador upon first meeting him, a smiling man with gold teeth holding a waxed paper umbrella, speaking Portuguese in a kind of patois, as if to say: you are in my country now and you would do well to learn my lingo. The Procurador spoke many languages at once; some obtuse, some threatening, some ingratiatingly flattering.
Upon disembarcation, Camilo Conceição wanted to climb back aboard the steamer. There were massive crowds of people the like of which he had not seen before, with their smooth skins, their hard-worn faces, all with something cheap to sell: a comb here, a toy there, fishhooks, rattan stools, fans, ivory earwax removers, joss sticks, salted fish. He thought it a terrible mistake to come to a place where his wealth could not buy anything of value. In a few days these contradictions worked their way into a justified feeling that he could not have gone further away to escape worth. Here he was, representing Catholicism and a King, when he was a Mason and a Republican. Here he was in a culture where there was no such thing as illegitimacy. Everyone acknowledged their children, if not by giving them their name, then at least by giving them some means of living. It was why the Procurador seemed to him so much more suitable to be a judge in Macau, but now the Procurador was calling him ‘Judge Conceição’ and the latter didn’t know if such an address warranted offence. They hadn’t had a Portuguese judge here for some years and the crime rate had dropped, the Procurador said. He added that he didn’t like it one bit, this oily compromise with the law. The Procurador fished inside the pockets of his linen suit – there were yellow rings beneath his armpits – and brought out a mouldy cigar which he offered, a first gift to a first judge, so he said, extending the object from his palm to his fingertips in the way of a magician. No, thank you, Camilo waved it away. The Procurador lit it for himself and the smoke smelt bad in the wet air. Then the second gift: I have a case for you, Judge. They referred it to the Portuguese court, since they presume we would be more aggressive, I mean, in pursuing the case. They? Well, a woman and her daughter. Let me tell you, it is not a simple case of slavery. The daughter was considered a mooi jai, you know, a child servant you could buy. The custom here is that if you have no children of your own you can adopt boys so their filial duty is to take your name and then continue your family fortune; but girls are different. They are not so highly considered. This woman’s daughter crept out to watch a Chinese opera. These shows occur at night on street corners. The Procurador took his arm and led him away from the Praia Grande into a narrow side street. Fruit-sellers beckoned to them half-heartedly. Dirty water slid down from the tarpaulins. Just here, the Procurador was saying…(walls of a house covered with soggy posters, an umbrella shop opposite, empty crates stacked over the mud so Conceição felt he was on stage, everyone watching from their windows and shopfronts, dark suspicious faces)…just here they built a bamboo frame and draped it with material, the Procurador said, stepping between puddles, breathing heavily so a whistling came from his nostrils. Musicians on that side, actors here, each having their moment above the lantern-light. It was here she was kidnapped, the Procurador smilingly reported.
Camilo was not very worldly. You can see from these yellowed pages of notes from his diary that he felt besieged by others. When they spoke to him he was assessing their grammar, monitoring their syntax. When they spoke Cantonese he was learning all the tones, listening to their expression for a way of responding to them in the same fashion. He was acting on their behalf. He had no suspicion of them whatsoever, but was afraid they may suspect his disingenuousness, since he was dissimulating in order not to get the better of them, but to become them in order to breathe their breath, to live their lives, to understand intimately a social fabric of which he would never be a part. It was as though every pore in his body was listening and sensing the world to the point where a deafening buzz drove him to repeat phrases used by others, to shout them out, to torture himself with the feeling he was nothing but another forgery of the world, an extra layer upon an already painted canvas. Perhaps this was why he learned Cantonese so quickly. He also applied himself to studying Chinese calligraphy, thereby becoming familiar not only with written Chinese, but with the art of writing; the art of art. He began to write poetry.
8
Camilo Conceição suffered from an anxiety of influence. He repressed any explicit mention of his precursor, Charles Baudelaire. From the beginning of his schooling, Conceição was obsessed with the Parisian poet who was forty-six years his senior. He secretly linked Baudelaire’s name with his own. The baudelaire was a kind of cutlass. Conceição was a corruption of the spelling of concepção, or conception. The irony of his conception and the legal fiction of his mother as housemaid while his father remained his father the Judge, brought a particularly masculine edge to his ideas of family. He was cut out of the womb, a caesarean birth. He was not the product of a marriage, but a concept, a conceito, an arrangement which left a stigmata on his flesh, carved from the blade of virtue. Parricide was never too far from his thoughts. Conceição thought much about his hero’s name. It was an anagram of air de l’aube: dawn air; a poisonous miasma from the polluted Seine; dew from which evil flowers sprouted. Bodies were found there, no cause of death established. When he read Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, he knew something monstrous had taken place inside himself. He would have to kill or be condemned to the flaw of reproduction.
9
Port Bou, Catalonia
4th April 1902
Darling Grace,
I have just left the studio at Cerbère. Port Bou is just on the other side of the border and it’s a strange little town on the sea, with a neat harbour and one little railway station. What’s strange about it is that the town is almost surrounded by scrubby hills very similar to those near Lithgow in New South Wales, but it’s much drier here, and there are practically no trees, just windblown bushes of fennel and stunted oaks and old women in black shawls combing the sides of the slopes for thyme or St John’s wort – like a funeral ceremony, their bowing and bending over the perpendicular earth. These hills also give off an eerie atmosphere, a smell of chalk and salt, of sea breeze caught in an amphitheatre, and indeed the train had to pass through a tunnel from the French side, debouching into a glare of light. I am writing this letter in a bar and the locals are looking at me in a suspicious manner. I suppose they are always suspicious of an unaccompanied woman, but I’ve cut my hair short, I wear trousers and swing a watch chain, so they really don’t know what to make of me. Can’t wait to get back to see you, but am already missing the crowd at Cerbère. Oh, darling, we must come here together in a few years time! All is light and perfume. What can I say but that I love you too dearly for you to be destroying yourself teaching in a girls school. I will be home soon, my darling and then we will plan our trip to China.
Fondest love. Anna.
Forever Sunday
Forever Sunday,
Christianity has given us Sunday nothingness.
We wait for work in the dreadful melancholy of tomorrow.
We find there is some virtue in the idea of work, though we hate the idea of it, not work, but the cliché of virtue.
On Sundays we Portuguese sit empty in our rooms reading the newspaper, wanting to be saved by writing.
In this gentlemen’s guesthouse in Macau, at 40 patacas a month, we have a bed, laundry service and passable meals.
We have wine, although it costs a little more than in Portugal.
On Sundays we play waltzes on the old harpsichord in the hall, trying to drive away our hearts, which keep turning towards Lusitania, in a westerly direction, across the sea.
We are men, are we not, with feelings?
On Sunday evenings we play with the two little baby tigers the owner, Hing Kee, has received as payment from an adventurous tenant. They scratch and bite and their pupils dilate and contract, like my blood pressure in the season of typhoons.
Sometimes we walk up the hill to the grand hotel, the Boa Vista, with views of Bishop’s Bay, always conscious of Sunday, always aware of the emptiness of the streets, longing for a bath in a clay and enamel Chinese tub into which an attendant has poured fresh hot water, wherein we linger, keeping Sunday to ourselves, keeping our leisure running and our neurosis close.
For we are civil servants.
Some of us, the conscientious ones, prepare Monday’s work in the drawing room, where there is a large billiard table they use for a desk, where they spread out their plans and graphs and ostentatiously place a pencil behind their ears, making the rest of us uncomfortable, for already we have forgotten the time of progress, that infernal train we feel is driving us into slavery, and we can only read the time as Sunday, in the eyes of the tiger who yawns with a red mouth, a furnace, its stomach ignorant of schedules.
10
A young girl was kidnapped on the corner of the rua de Roma. The Procurador’s secret police captured the culprit. There he is in a bamboo cage. His arms and hands are bound with rattan. Around his neck, a leather strap. This can be wetted down, not to cool him, but to strangle him when it dries. Then it can be soaked again. He is lucky, the Procurador says to the assembled crowd. Under Chinese jurisdiction, outside the enclave, he would already have had his side pierced with a knife, so the organs are revealed one by one. A lesson in anatomy. Then his arms and legs would be cut off with a chopper. This would be done amongst the crowd, so people would have a close-up view, to participate in the carnage out of a fascination with the spectacle, with what is normally forbidden; the awe of the law.
The presiding judge was Camilo Conceição.
Portuguese law condemns slavery and execution, he begins. But he knows this is not about slavery, execution or Portuguese law, but about the customs of the Chinese. This was the ironic twist of Christianity: You could not apply Portuguese family law to heathens. It was liberalism by default. But Judge Conceição is of the old school. He believes one should be equal before the law. In opposition to the views of the Procurador, Judge Conceição declares that defendants cannot have it both ways. One law for all.
The judge looks at the plaintiff. She is attractive, in a hardfaced way. There is never a smile. But then again, this is not a smiling matter. She has plaited her hair up on her head, in an attempt to look more mature, perhaps. She cannot be more than twenty-four years of age. That means she would have had her own child at the age of twelve.
The prosecutor begins his speech. Kidnapping and slavery are serious matters. But Judge Conceição is not listening. The defendant has already stated he bought the girl. Yes, slavers are sending people abroad from Macau, but in Macau itself, there is no slavery per se. The Chinese buy and sell everything, including children. To prosecute every case, they would have to prosecute virtually every family in Macau. Minors are sold for adoption and domestic service. But it is not about a price. It is about a gratuity. Like a marriage dowry. No price is set, but it is about compensating the parents for the loss of their child.
All this is rattling through Judge Conceição’s mind. He sees very clearly that the kidnapper had not paid enough. It was purely a money matter. His mind drifts to Paris. He sees Baudelaire and the black prostitute Jeanne Duval. Baudelaire understood prostitution: the wage labour of his mistress; the prostitution of his art. Judge Conceição looked at the young girl, the mother’s child. The child was extremely pretty. The child was smiling at him. She leant her head against her mother’s breast. Madonna and child. Sphinx and angel, both almondeyed and brazen. Conceição ponders over the fact that children are the oldest form of commodity in the oldest civilisation. Nothing was more of a mass article than progeny. Devoid of sex, desire was essentially the voluptuousness of buying and selling, of coinage. Just as Judge Conceição took pleasure in having to rewrite the law.
The judge takes a drink from his water flask. It stands next to a clay pot, which is ochre in colour and decorated by a red and white motif: an old white-bearded man sits on a mountaintop meditating, his head in the clouds. A goddess on a distant mountain acts as a counterpoint, a siren depicted on the same scale, distracting him from philosophy. Chinese painters were never interested in physical scale. Like a Bach fugue, the mountains are piled, one on top of another, as if this multiplicity made them immeasurable and contradictory. It was conceptual art. Conceição had bought this clay pot at the markets behind his guesthouse. They could have given it to him because it leaked. There seemed to be a small hole at the bottom. Maybe it was meant to be filled with soil, for a plant. But no, the barrowman wanted a quarter of a pataca for it. He called it a clepsydra. The judge called it a bargain. The pleasure of the squeeze.
The prosecutor was droning on. Judge Conceição sweated just listening to his tumid style. The prosecutor waxed lyrical, drew out a white handkerchief, mopped his brow, his puffy white sleeves fluttering over his face. Conceição could never have prosecuted. He never believed enough in pure evil. He could never see the devil rising from hell in counterpoint to God’s descent. No, good and evil were equidistant, like the northern Sung design on his clay pot, and all was adjudged by compass and square, not by the trickery of perspective. Each a function of the other. The prosecutor was using a well-known currency: aware that Chinese families purchased members in return for certain rights over them…filial duties, concubinage etc., it would be better to pursue the lesser charge of kidnapping in order to secure a conviction, rather than take the hypocritical European stance on child slavery. The latter was an emotional issue, and the Chinese did not deal with emotions as something to be exalted. Emotions had no social relevance. One’s behaviour, one’s selfreliance, were far more important than self-expression of this kind. But the prosecutor was taking a long time about it. People in the courtroom were fanning themselves, falling asleep. They were already bored with this celebrated case.
In order to bring his mind back to the current situation, Judge Conceição made an unprecedented announcement. He cut short the prosecutor’s closing speech by pointing to the clay pot on his desk. The water has all leaked away. Your time has gone.
Counterfeit
You could call me the counterfeit judge, but cutting time short brought value to judgment, worth to coin.
I had no real calling for it, to pronounce verdicts as though one had made a discovery of guilt when there was no such thing.
The law, any law when translated, is counterfeit. It is about the two sides of our nature; the two sides of our word which we give and then take back.
It is not about writing poetry on a Sunday afternoon, inspired by Baudelaire’s clock.
I suffer, therefore, from something that is non-existent; the sliced conscience of the advocado.
But I am irritated by Chinese indifference to their own suffering.
I am a double-man and the abyss is widening.
I pronounced that the kidnapper was guilty of forced imprisonment, and to emphasise the power of the European court, in conjunction with the wishes of the Chinese people, I referred the defendant to stand trial in a Chinese court for not proving he had paid for the girl. I assume he will pay quickly and be done with the matter. But there is always the possibility he will have his arms and legs chopped off.
This is what I call the counterfeit coin of Colonial Law. One can pass it off quickly, like water in a leaky pot; or one can pass it on slowly, where I’m sure the drip of water from a clay pot will be used as a vessel of torture and eventually, execution.
The courtroom is stuffy and the crowd is only half-satisfied. They flutter their straw fans at their breasts and talk loudly. No blood today. When then?
Camilo Conceição was a collector. He was an obsessive shopper. He went on sprees in the markets of old Macau. Old junk; brocantes; pots and pipes. It was raining of course. It always rained when he went to the markets. He bought a clepsydra and listened to it clinking and sloshing with ancient sounds: kleptein, to steal; hydo-r, water. It had gearwheels and a floating dart carried by a cherub, pointing out the hour on a drum marked with lines. Water was syphoned off from a small aperture by a waterwheel. He set it up in his bathroom. He was so consumed by this purchase – he paid too much for it – that he fell into a kind of swoon. The object had taken on a value beyond itself, and within its aura he had become very small, shrunk to nothing, wishing to pass though a vanishing point. The eye of a needle sees much.
A few days later, Conceição was trying to adjust the time when his pocket watch slipped from his hands and fell to the floor, shattering the glass over its dial. He looked for a repairer and found one on the second floor of a dilapidated house and there behind a counter sat a girl with very nimble fingers, whose sole job was to fix watches. As he looked on, she removed the shards from the dial and screwed on a new glass. Her enslavement to this task in this dark room, her devotion to this object which normally sat intimately in his trouser pocket, her presence as an industrial slave whom he had purchased for a few minutes, produced a dilation of his desire. Watching her fingers, he grew intimate with her in the small space of her infinity.
He’s not sure what to make of these feelings of contraction and expansion. He can only relate them to his heart, which is not in good shape and which pumps erratically, shrinking and dilating so violently it feels constricted by coils of water serpents. His body tries to escape from itself through a small hole in time. The girl charges too much, but he pays. He is happy enough to be used; if only he could do something to rescue an unknown talent from her abjection.
Chromatic Insanity
Several months now, I have been sinking into this place; the oily glare grounds my canvas; sheen of white light over the muddy pane of the delta; lazy rattan blinds sway over old balconies where my haemic respiration keeps sex at bay, so far from sleep, so close to death the latter has become familiar; bones crack in the cemetery, where ancient explorers, used to the thunderclaps of storm and cannon, moulder beneath stones unkempt and forgotten; temple dogs stray over them, rabid, cowering and dangerous; in the shops across the street foetuses doze in glass jars; I stand before them, deciding between snake-wine and powdered tiger-testicles, strolling from chamber to chamber in the cool darkness which smells of worn wood and dried herbs and I am absorbing a humid illness, which will turn me into dusty matter, drive me into my own portrait, a small disappearance into indifferent monochrome, that of a man without consequence, whose heart, meatless, has stopped hungering for Europe.
My bowels are bad; I hire a vehicle; a tricycle, a contraption ridden by a man pedalling in front, his ribs rippling beneath a yellow skin tanned by sun and anaemic from opium, his chest rattling wet bellows; I buy a small tin bathtub to place in my rooms, away from the noisy operatics of the other civil servants; I wash often to keep clean; my intestines ache and maybe there is something missing there, perhaps I am semi-colonic; threading our way now through the narrow streets I know by heart; Macau a small place; I do not need to travel any distance, but am reaching further and faster in this vehicle powered by a human narrowly harnessed to life; I negotiate a price with him; it is his livelihood; he doesn’t want to sell; I meet his boss, a Mr. Lok Yu, who can arrange for me to own one of these trishaws, but I would have to buy the license as well; we come to an arrangement; I could pay it off on instalment, but I would not be allowed to carry any passengers; I agree; the trishaw keeps me above the crowd, allowing me to fly past without brushing against them while remaining very much in their midst, smelling them, hearing them; I am in graceful motion, I tip slightly, but am still in place; a rider of a black iron tricycle with an iron bar in front and a cushioned bench and a fold-down canopy. Every morning a new desperation; I have the luxury of melancholy, accursed for having been a judge; and because of my laughable body which only wants to sneak through a tiny aperture in the world to escape the small fate of a fat-arsed judge, because I lament the useless speed and the deadly mass and the deafening hysteria that Western industrial time will become, where I will not be able to dream for the acceleration of colours, where I will not hear the echo of my awareness of the world for the hubbub of the maddened crowd, where I will not breathe the air of freedom because of its small-mindedness, I shall give it up; judging, that is; and attend to the eye of the needle and all that; consider it accomplished, this exile. I bought several long indigo gowns, the kind Chinese men wear.
Each morning I ride the small triangular route of five miles between the Leal Senado, the Border Gate and the Boa Vista Hotel. In this daily round I am able to gauge the vital rhythms of the heart which work against the brain.
The kidnapping case has been a watershed. It has divided me. I will no longer represent the King, Catholicism or Portugal. I have taken a job as a schoolmaster. It is a step downwards. Sometimes in the rain I see myself and my children absorbed into China, plying this route on their trishaws in sodden blue pyjamas. Everything goes downward. Blue anyway.
I have come to an arrangement with the mother and child. I have paid money to release them from their employer, along with the understanding that they will live with me, the woman as my concubine, her daughter as my mooi jai, or bondservant. Silver Eagle and Nickel Hawk. Birds of prey. There is no problem here with the counterfeit of marriage. I paid 1000 patacas to the mother’s pimp, freeing her from prostitution and rescuing her daughter from the same trade. I enclosed 500 patacas in a red and gold lucky envelope and gave it to the mother as a goodwill gesture that I will look after her daughter. Oh, and I have moved to a two-storey house on the Praia Grande, right on the embankment, so that the glare of the rippling water is projected on my embossed metal ceiling when I doze on Sunday afternoons, my heart pounding with exhaustion from all that vigorous coupling.
After that I play the piano. A passacaglia. I am dancing with pretty women in the street. One is not carried away completely, as in a fugue. Dreaming of Coímbra. My deep melody is not what sentimentalists call romantic love, though that is something for which I have never stopped yearning. Unfortunately, Nickel Hawk’s growing beauty only shows up the ugliness of my playing. I stop.
12
The letters to and from Australia keep cropping up in the Conceição archive in the vaults of the National Museum on the rua São Paulo in Macau. Now that we know he was a collector, it isn’t so much of a mystery. He obviously bought the letters from those junk shops you find in the East, down an alley, the doorway covered by a curtain, where it was always dark inside, so you can’t inspect very carefully all the copies and forgeries, calligraphy by Genghis Khan, for God’s sake. On the counters you can find boxes of photographs, letters, stamps, incense, pens and brushes. But these letters he has kept don’t seem so valuable. One can conclude from them that the two women correspondents were artists, one a potter and sculptor and the other an oil painter. Conceição was of course very interested in collecting art. The Chinese collection that was sent to the Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris contained some gems.
Conceição’s poems seem to be minor things, little impressions, tiny watercolours he recorded about Macau, no doubt inspired now by his new domestic circumstances, preparing his lessons for the boys school, his Portuguese classes filled with desultory students, sons of diplomats and civil servants, privileged offspring of wealthy Chinese merchants eager for a European connection. And Conceição? What about him? He doesn’t like his job. He moons at the classroom window, unfolding his dreams over Bishop’s Bay. Each morning a new desperation. His pupils have no revolutionary spirit. Don’t they see that the King’s days are numbered? That Portugal will no longer be the colonial power that it once was? That it is management of the colonies that is sending it broke? Young poets were committing suicide: Mário de Sá Carneiro; his good friend Antero de Quental; all impotent romantics and rhetorical republicans. It was good that he had left Portugal. At least his was a slow suicide.
As a dozy Chinaman smokes his long pipe,
as a cured fish gazes blindly
into the fumy night,
flanks skewered with chopsticks,
Portugal lies in its fix
sleeping unclothed,
sunk in dreams, feverish.
A cold wind rushes through
the colonial arcades
and another red-haired Autumn flees.
13
Darling Grace,
…the excitement of such love generates the same heat as most other passions, but the difference is danger. Conventional love confronts you with another being, a man, entirely different from you, with his smells and his harsh and hairy body and his belligerent mind. It is his job to hunt, not to linger over passion. In our kind of love however, you too often discover yourself as a lack – because a mirror of your own weaknesses is constantly displayed; a doubling of sameness (not a tautology!), and a multiplication of self-hatred. Companionship teeters precariously on the edge of this narcissism. This is the danger: an obsessive dependency turned into a thick cobweb of feeling too intricate to unpick on a daily basis. Sometimes it is a numbness. Sometimes you wish to be swallowed up by the other. My deep, deep love is for you, my dearest.
Your Anna.
Sapphic love is either infernal or divine; perhaps both. That’s what Baudelaire said. But his was a man’s mythology, raiding antiquity for justification. He wanted to call his volume of poetry Les Lesbiennes, rather than Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was a dandy. He was obsessed with his mother’s long silk skirts. How he hid his face in the folds. Fetishists had revolutionary instincts: the effete and the abject were powerful political tools. It was shock value for the bourgeoisie which was always threatened by the lack of boundaries. The smell of silk and perfume and the lure of fashion. Baudelaire couldn’t afford to wash. Prostitutes no longer took off their clothes for him. He pushed on, through the folds of the crowds, over the barricades. Abasement fascinated him; his lover a prostitute; both commodity and stimulus. As much a silk cravat as the green jelly of hashish. This may be the last beautiful moment of the century, wrote Camilo Conceição on a paper napkin.
These items were all there in his archive, together with his manuscripts, between the pages of which was a pressed and dried lily flower.
Living Money
She smiles like a cat, unmistakably sly, but teasing still, revealing silver teeth. She sits on the edge of my bed, but it is understood she has her own quarters. Behind her, the wide window frames bat-winged junks gliding between misty hills. At the back of this house, with stairs leading down to the cool courtyard, she is mistress. She looks after her daughter well. She keeps a good house and goes to the wet markets for the best deals. Then she prepares the meals while I teach at the Boa Vista, a former hotel which is now a secondary school, up on the incline overlooking the Praia Grande. Each day she notes down what she has spent in one column, what each item of food has cost in another. Her figures are neat, impeccably calculated. Outgoing; incoming. I pay her a little more for public holidays, when she goes to worship her ancestors or sweep the graves.
She has laid out my suit for the day. I have more than two pairs of shoes now, more than six shirts. She presses my handkerchiefs with a flatiron heated on a coal stove. I jingle the coins in my pocket before I leave for work. This makes her smile. In the common room at the school I examine my coins and find amongst them an American silver dollar. There is an eagle on the back. In God We Trust. I don’t think I will change my mind about God upon my death. I wish for no afterlife; get me out of this one. Of course I would like to die like a book; but it will be certain no one will come to my rescue, no friend to edit friendship for itself, cut the pages to air my soul. Illiteracy is my attendant. But really, all this talk about finality is a little shortsighted. There is no final day; the quotidian is death, each day a day of the dead.
She smiles, even if she doesn’t feel like smiling. She may not understand feeling at all, because she said it was very inconvenient; a burden, she said, which she had disposed of many years ago. She overcomes pain by soaring above her prey. I call her Silver Eagle. Dressed in her rough black silk, walking flat-footedly with her plaits flapping, she is an Indian squaw we see on magiclantern nights at the school. The other teachers, weighed down by families they had brought with them from Portugal, look at me with some envy. It makes my heart lighter for having entered passion on a different floor.
Each day her daughter becomes more beautiful. The girlwoman flowers like an orchid. I teach her Portuguese and watch her mind opening to the day with the sound of birds. I call her Nickel Hawk. Malleable and ductile, occurring in combination with arsenic or sulphur. I educate her aesthetic instincts, almost as rapidly as I develop my own, in the categories of greatness in Chinese painting. I tell her about the four levels of human formation: skill, cultivation, wisdom and spiritual insight. I said cleverness was not enough. On the lowest rung, that is, on the level of skill, formal beauty is all that can be attained. A surplus value. I did not mention that a woman could go no higher. I think she understood this was where she was heading, though I probably confused aesthetics with biology when I explained that a girl in flower was a beautiful image in French, but haematose in English. She should always try and do better.
It began to rain then, while we were sitting on our stools in the courtyard feeding the chickens. I gave Nickel Hawk the book I had purchased, on early sixteenth-century Chinese painting. She liked the illustrations of grasshoppers and shrimps. She astounded me by saying how beautiful the images were, compared to the language, which was vulgar and vile. She also said that flowers were not as important as fruit. I was completely taken aback. Then by giving you this book, my language is less vile? I asked. Oh yes, she said smiling. And then she hugged me. And for the first time in many months, I returned to writing poetry; from the fruit of my viscera.
14
…we arrived at Victoria Street Potts Point, before a row of terrace houses. We were let in through an iron gate by an old woman who, from the way she smelled and swayed, was drunk and she led us up to the first floor where a rehearsal by a chamber group was in full swing. They were all women, in various stages of intoxication. There was a Courbet reproduction on the yellow wall. They played lewd music on their instruments. It was hard to imagine such a coven in staid Sydney. The din and chatter deafening. Somebody had closed the shutters and the heat was stifling and a few people in the audience started to undress, first exposing corsets and modest pantaloons and then showing off their backs and their legs. It was all laughter and fun, but not for a country girl like me; it seemed punishable, saved by the fact that it was athletic. In Australia, mannish women seeking female companionship was not uncommon, Anna said. I’ve not seen anything like that, not anywhere. Anna said Parisiennes threw up their skirts without provocation, though there it was accepted, but only if subsumed by an aesthetic. Anna was always the bold one. Much more intelligent than me. She was eyeing off one of the girls, a boyish blonde, thin in the hips, who was wearing nothing but a bow tie around her neck. Another was sliding out of her dress. I felt relief, not jealousy. Anna began to kiss and fondle the bodies, and soon the whole room was roiling and seething with buttocks and shadows and breasts, humid with female odours, the walls swelling with all that heat, the air heavy with groans and sighs. Somebody approached me and rubbed her hand over me. She had a very deep voice and a German accent and her hair rasped against my thighs and her tongue began to drive me wild…
Asthenia
I suffer from a debility. At times I am so exhausted I cannot even raise my pen to write. I put it down to the air pressure; another trial for me to undergo. I do not have strong emotions, and my words are pallid and insipid. Even the ink looks anaemic. They say this part of the coast is particularly prone to the infestation of typhus. It sweeps up from Canton. My physician, Dr Gonzales, bleeds me and makes me even weaker.
Nickel Hawk is now thirteen and a half years old and at thirteen and a half the Chinese consider her a woman, of marriageable age, ready to be sold, ready to have more than her dowry returned by her husband, ready to have children, ready to have a son whose filial duties would be to create or continue the family’s prosperity. Looks do not come into it. Feelings do not come into it. But I am different. I am a Westerner. I am Portuguese. She teases me with her guile and her innocence. I do not sleep at night. I buy her embroidered silk pyjamas. Her little breasts bulge. Within a budding grove down by the Governor’s gardens I observe her at play, dancing over stones placed on the cinder path. My brief career as a judge has trained me to be controlling, to manage the rowdy courtroom. This self wants to come to the fore. But as one who has poetic ambitions, such a self should be the last thing to emerge. Few poets really understand this: to be passive, receptive, free. Baudelaire understood too much. He collapsed outside a church and died soon after. He shattered the windows of the reader’s stuffy consciousness and let in fresh air, so one could tell the difference between that and the human excrement which was being regurgitated all across Europe. It is Baudelaire who keeps me from judgment; also from acting. A tightrope. That is how my sex feels. Wound achingly like a road into the hills where a mist comes down in the evening to blind acuity. But there is nothing wrong with intellectual adventuring is there? I have to keep my failings better veiled. Even if Nickel Hawk, in a fit of pique, embarrassed at my observation, has left her silk pyjamas rolled up at the bottom of my bed. I went to the old cathedral and mooned about before the black façade.
15
While a typhoon sweeps around the South China coast, Camilo Conceição is wrestling with young Nickel Hawk. He makes fun of her, while she clambers above him, half angry and half triumphant when he pretends to submit. This is a close bond. His permanent depression seems to have lifted. He is rejuvenated. The shutters flap. One window is flung open and his papers fly. His precious collection.
If you look at his photos you will see he has been playacting all along. In every single one he does not face the camera fully. His eyes are crossed, his big beard makes a mockery of his small body, that of a dwarf ’s, staring darkly straight ahead, at an invisible Snow White in the wings. It is true, he said his optical nerve entered his right eyeball at an odd angle. Once, disguised as a medical student at the university in Coímbra, he observed the instructor removing the eyeballs from a human head. He wanted to gag behind his mask. He then realised there was always a mask. He grew his beard longer. When you posed for photos you had to stand there for a long time for the exposure to take hold. To be exposed to death. He understood this exposition. He understood how we would be looking at him in the future. A portrait of Conceição captured in dead time, reproduced in biographies, on the covers of his collect ions of poems. The same photograph, mirrored everywhere in the glass of bookshops, reaching all the way back to that day in the photographer’s studio, when he saw his eyes removed from his head and understood decomposition. What he does not tell us is how secretively he had preserved his original face with that beard. It will never fall apart and we will never know it.
He worked hard. He overworked, studying Chinese, reading ancient texts in the original, preparing his lessons, learning about painting, writing his poetry. The last was the most difficult. The ghost of Baudelaire hovered heavily in the humid air. He had yet to find his path, but from his study of Oriental painting, he learned that first he had to copy the master and then slowly to steal his secrets. He learned by first placing himself at the opposite pole, in exile from industrious Europe, by immersing himself in this moral slagheap which was even more commercial, full of graft, material gain and perverse sensuality. It would be impossible for him to have the same feelings as Baudelaire but he could assimilate this language, make it his, so that his own heart would be transformed along with it. He would do this by translating Baudelaire’s Spleen et Idéal into Chinese. He would recover his strength if he improvised hellishly, breaking the rules of style. What would Baudelaire mean to the Chinese? They would like his indifference.
Cat
Nickel Hawk appeared stark naked at the door to my room while I was writing. I admonished her severely. I said she lacked decorum. I said only cats were so brazen, and what if we had visitors? Her mother heard the commotion and ran upstairs to drag her daughter away. Then Silver Eagle began to scold me for teaching her child European ways. There is nothing left for you to take away, she shouted, except her innocence. It is of no value to you.
There is a perfume left in my room; a mixture of muslin, velvet, silk and fur; it makes the rules of language seem porous and transient; perhaps I could soar on the wings of my beating heart. While I work, Silver Eagle spends nights away from the house. I know from what Nickel Hawk tells me that her mother is earning extra money. I do not ask what she does. We lead separate lives and providing she looks after my needs I do not question her. Yet this gossip has stirred me. Of course I am jealous. Of course Baudelaire was jealous, imagining his mistress in the arms of rough men. We are men first, not poets. We compose with the exultation of revenge. But we live with the idea of possession and the threat of abandonment. One should act first. I should turn it to my advantage, by teaching everyone a lesson. I have bought a ticket to Lisbon for a rest cure, as advised by Dr Gonzales. Silver Eagle and Nickel Hawk will weep and moan in case I do not return. Their golden goose has contracted asthenia.
I disembarked in Marseilles for an old calling. Increasingly unbound, I did not feel like returning home.
16
At this point the documents reveal nothing. A faded train ticket. A strand of horse(?) hair in a small red envelope with golden Chinese characters wishing everyone a happy new year. Strangely, what Conceição didn’t dare experiment with in Macau, he tried in Marseilles once again. Observe the honey-coloured stains on the inside of the envelope: the indelible marks of the amber balls he kept rolled and bagged like jasmine tea which caused a little flaring above the candleflame; the three puffs he took, coughing slightly, for he had chronic bronchitis form the sea voyage; the way the day opened up inside him when he woke. There was no occlusion, which he experienced after heavy drinking. There was no semen over his eyes, which is what he said blinded him when Silver Eagle refused him sex.
He sat on the terraces of restaurants observing the faces in the morning. He wrote, without embellishment, of his newly acquired interest in physiognomy, of not having seen so many European faces for a year or so. He found them ugly, fleshy, too large. Chinese heads were nothing but waxed skulls. Here, these people were feasting constantly, their mouths open all day, chatting, yawning, eating. Red mouths, bulbous lips, yellow teeth. Hydrocephalic heads about to explode. The constant convulsions of their bodies.
He made his way to bustling Paris. Such hysterical crowds, driven into a stupor by the idea of Christmas. Fin de siècle insouciance; delirium; exhaustion. Easy optimism flung from lush salons like confetti. It would be a new century of horror, the world cheated by science. He took a train to Lisbon.
Restaurante em Lisboa
I am not one for discussing money.
My friends know that. Fernando, they say, you don’t even spend words; you inhabit those of others. My name is Fernando Pessoa. I’m a poet. But I also have many other names. They are poets too.
You’ll see me in second-storey eateries; dark, wooded, heavy places above the taverns. On Sundays they fill up a little. Noisy families with drooping faces straight from shopping in the arcades off the Chiado. Here in the ‘Brasileira’, António Botto and I sit at two small round tables, drumming out poor rhythms, chatting without wit about the riots at the university. Since our parents moved to Lisbon we have hardly ever left this city.
A small man enters, sailing to a nearby booth, tacking like a lorcha, bat-winged in his cape, jerking here and there to get it right, his beard before him, his dark eyes crossed above like large billiard balls nudging the heavy felt of his eyelashes. My friend António coughed and pointed with his chin and said that was Camilo Conceição. He had two poems, visions from Macau, in this quarter’s Orpheu magazine. Botto introduced himself to the dwarf and beckoned me over to them, speaking with his hands as he always did when wildly excited, whether by poetry or by lipstick. The bearded poet looked alarmed. At first I thought his lips had fused behind the forest of facial hair. Then there was a tiny laugh and glittering teeth blackened by what we knew: oracles didn’t come cheaply. Steering away from opinion, we chatted slowly about the relative merits of hashish and opium. Sooner or later, we experienced the feeling of oneness; sameness. We were doubled and tripled by the amorous joy of what we had previously inhaled in solitude, which now crackled into daylight from hidden pores. Immensely polite, we had no wish to offend. We spoke of painting and perspective, viewed under the influence. Conceição said he saw every painting as destitution or fortune; you could talk it up or talk it down. Like hypnotising roosters.
Botto, with moth-like transformations, powdered his nose and waved a horsehair violin bow about, conferring a ridiculous dignity upon our meeting, which had now seemed destined, and one fine grey strand from the poor animal’s tail floated into the poet’s beard. The latter did not seem to notice, but said, after a moment’s hesitation: ‘There’s still life in old hobbyhorses.’
Botto later said Camilo was the pope of tropes. Of course he was referring to the bicycle, Botto exclaimed. He’s writing a poem. Lisbon is crowded with bicycles, poets and hobbyhorses. Conceição had written down my name before he left. Peso. No, Pessoa, I repeated. A person; it’s no one. That was the one and only time I ever met the celebrated symbolist. We paid for his meal. When he had gone, Botto shrugged, loosing off one of those remarks of his I’d always found fatuous. Nature spends us, he said. Look at my stomach.
We were aloft for a moment, believing we were poets, that there was significance in human memory made out of human words…before a slow lobotomy adjusted the balance. We watched the other patrons eating slow-cooked African chicken, and listened to the rain outside. At our age we were all interchangeable.
17
It was a chance meeting between two poets. But through greater fortuity, Conceição, intoxicated by Lisbon, deliberating whether or not to return to his family in the East, tossed a coin to decide the matter. He could not act like the judge he used to be, yet he still rationalised, even after the coin lay still on its ‘Oriental’ side. For him, Europe would be all repetition. He had to strike out on his own. He called on his friend’s sister, Hannah Osório de Castro, with whom he was ‘involved’ in an unrequited love, and melodramatically begged her to write letters to him so he could inhale her perfume when he unsealed them. It was an overture and a farewell. It decided the matter. Having said this, he could never go back on his word, for it would be grave cowardice. He said he would never return. She was disturbed by this, but could do nothing. She did not love him. He was like a little dog, charming and helpless. Her feeling was quite different from passion or love. Camilo knew this was all play-acting; he couldn’t help it. He imagined a permanent camera lens pointing at him. His little provocations. Steadfast love was not for the ugly. In Macau, a wife could at least be bought and this freed him. Exchange value untangled all kinds of emotion. With this secret safe in his heart, he would be able to relinquish that organ for poetry. Hannah spent one sleepless night and then dismissed the idea that he was serious. She wanted to help him without being compromised. She had a small annuity. While the oblique rain swept past her window, she fantasised: she would invest in a small printing press; she would make him famous.
It is almost unimaginable how difficult it is to get a glimpse of Conceição; how he keeps fading when you look too closely. There is no diary, no serious biography, only scraps of poems, some of which had been published by Hannah Osório de Castro, some of which remain undiscovered until now. Camilo Conceição reveals and conceals himself in rain and mists, pumping out poetry in a periodic diastolic and systolic motion, contracting and dilating like the arteries of his heart. Sometimes the world rocked with his body. Dictated to him.
Hannah was his childhood sweetheart. It was only when he went away to the Far East and then returned briefly to Portugal on account of ill health that he saw her again with new eyes. She had blossomed. Her flaxen hair waved in the wind. Her celéste silk dress fluttered about her shapely legs. She had put on weight. When she undertook the journey to Lisbon in order to meet him, he thought she had developed a love for him. Not knowing how love works, that it is, in its passionate variety, a weakening at first sight, he thought the other could grow into love. In his isolation in Macau he dreamt of how he would love her and by dreaming in this way, imagined himself into love as it would be expressed by Hannah, who was burgeoning like a blue hydrangea.
So when she met him on the corner of the rua Augusta and walked with him at his suggestion, to the Almada Negreiros exhibition, he felt it to be a major coup. She had declined lunch as she was meeting a friend earlier and luncheon in a pavilion by the river would have run like a ladder in her stocking into the late afternoon and there would be pauses and soon a change of heart. But here she is, holding on to his arm as they step off the sidewalk, her long dress almost too stylish with its lace and swinging tassels at the hem, brushing against his unironed trousers, his shabby coat, the holes in his armpits. He was saying to her how important it was to write from experience. Under his other arm, a folded newspaper. The headlines had proclaimed a huge disaster. An earthquake had hit San Francisco. A huge fire had followed, and most of the city had been destroyed. If it were not for his anaemia, Camilo Conceição said, he would go there, to see for himself. Don’t be so silly, Hannah said. You are such a one for first-hand impressions. Doesn’t a photograph capture it for you? No, he said. He was thinking how he could never just visualise. He had to feel it in his heart. When he looked away from her…indeed, he was incapable of looking straight at her to study her because there was an earthquake in his heart and he was cross-eyed to boot…when he looked away, he thought how beautiful she had become. It was the glow of sexual experience, which would darken for him at a later stage.
Hannah however, was hardly ever silent about feeling, so had she never expressed an interest in him, no matter how slight? Here she was rattling on about earthquakes. On All Saints’ Day, she said, on the morning of 1st November, 1755, two shocks, forty minutes apart, raised the waters of the Targus. A huge tide swelled up from the riverbed and thundered through the city. Churches collapsed; fires erupted. Thirty thousand lives were lost. What can be learned from disasters, both man-made and natural? she asked.
I think apart from platitudes, that all of this is both cyclic and immanent, he replied. It is only newspapers and photographs which have brought us the catastrophe as though it were new; made it ours as a novelty; but these are perpetually without reality. It is the way we have decided to speak…at arm’s length from the disaster which ‘will never happen to us’…which disengages us from life, but it is also this necessity which unites us. So what we can learn is to speak less of catastrophe and more of human experience. In other words, to see and feel proximity for ourselves, rather than simply to fantasise. In this way we quickly learn that living is a daily tragedy.
He meant his failing attempts to engage her love. He somehow meant that if there were an instant catastrophe she would immediately fall into both his arms. In his clumsiness he let the folded newspaper slide into the gutter. She laughed a tinkling laughter. Hannah never let a good argument go past. On her own admission, it was because she was Jewish. But she delighted in arguing with her friend from childhood. She liked to tease Conceição, who was small and bristly, like a little bear. Of course it is the case with everything that there should be more reflection, she said, more sympathetic imagining – which, I think, is quite different from inserting oneself into the event in order to understand it. If one can understand something only by washing it through oneself, then what a tiny little world that would be!
The water in the gutter was black, like the gutters in Macau. He thought about picking up the newspaper, but was paralysed by what she would think. Then again, it conveyed an important tragedy and could not be left in the dirty water. He decided against it. He had bought the paper after all. He could buy another. Let the gutter water wash through the catastrophic event. For a moment he saw that one of the rapidly soaking pages bore a headline that read Silver Eagle. No, it was the price of silver. It had gone up. He had sworn to keep that part of his life a secret.
I would agree to disagree over the tiny world washed through one’s experience, he replied. I would say that is the only thing worth reading…the tiny world. It is the truth in its experience. I take Degas’ cautionary remark about ‘painting falsely’ to heart. The price of tin was up as well, he noticed. Brazilian mines were closing down. Of course, he continued, the imagination can enlarge and can profoundly open one’s way of viewing; but there is a danger of gilding the lily. A tinny sound emanates from false flowers. Though when the cracked bell of the world is struck by a real artist, Hannah interjected, it begins to ring true.
That was the problem. All this talk. What was he feeling? Indifference or empathy? He was no good at it, but was simply happy to have her there. He noticed she was in good spirits, her forearms up, fingers outstretched, raising each shoulder alternately. She had rouged her lips. Then he had a thought like a blowfly he encountered in the country which stuck to his forehead persistently, winging off whenever he raised his hand. She had been lunching with someone else. There was a scent of alcohol with her perfume. A touch of garlic on her breath. How idiotic of him to have assumed she had come to Lisbon simply to meet him!
Hannah adjusted her hair. She pinned it back and reset the angle of her black hat. She let a silence ensue, which no doubt he was misinterpreting as a reflection on his words. No, she did not think he was a true artist. At least not yet. But what she had to tell him was not that. She was going to tell him that she was getting married; that she was already secretly engaged to an important man, Diogo de Melo Sampaio, a minister in the government who owned a publishing company. It would be Sampaio’s second marriage and he did not want this to be announced prematurely.
I am intending to publish a selection of your poetry…she said to Conceição…in a limited edition.
She saw the joy in his face beneath his beard. Perhaps it was a sign of the transition in him: from not being worthy of her to being noteworthy in the world. Just as well. He heard the gurgle in the still pool, the small earthquake in his heart, the tidal wave of his ambition. Something at least had been rescued from his disappointment. But still, the residue. Her blue figure in the distance as he left her. The crack of the wind of experience. Don’t you run away, he said to himself. But he did.
Praia
To arrive at a seawall. The point beyond which you can no longer go. See how the waves crash over the stone and froth up on the footpath. In years to come the passages between these islands will silt up with sand, causing time to collapse…I will be able to ride my trishaw across all of them in hardly any time. Time, which has always been a law, will be defeated not by sand, but by writing. How can this be so? Because the discovery of my poems will open up new worlds. I write this on the back of a cheap painting I’ve bought, to a woman I’ve loved, but can love no longer. It was an association brought about by my sickness. She loved me because she could pity me. I loved her perhaps because she didn’t care enough. That has always been the case with love from time immemorial. But what has this to do with time? Well then, we shall see.
Every morning I ride my tricycle to this point on Coloane Island in Macau, inured to the irritant of its wheels squeaking against the worn brakes. I stop and watch dealers selling paintings here by the seawall. They are here when the sea is calm. It would seem like a better idea to sell paintings in galleries or shops, so there must be a reason why they are risking the unpredictability of the sea. Perhaps because they, the sellers, do not know worth or quality, obsessed by the easy money that passes through their hands. I look at the faces. These are not coarse. Not the worn, sunken cheeks of coolies. Their clothing is drab, but remarkably clean. They stand here by the seawall and prop up their paintings on the stone and watch for the sea drilling a small aperture at their feet. See how the water drains back through the tiny gap. They did not paint these scrolls and wall-hangings. All part of their family heirloom. They are selling them off because the revolution has begun. The last emperor has abdicated and the Manchu dynasty has collapsed. Last night a man presented himself at my house and asked for my support. I thought at first he was a fugitive, a political refugee. I received him in my bath. It took me a while to recognise him. He was in no need, I could see that. His high collar was immaculate. He wanted the support of the new Republican Portuguese government, which had taken power from the monarchists a year before. I told him…he had a sensitive round face, a salt-and-pepper moustache and a winning smile…that I had no official standing in the enclave. Nevertheless, he said. He shook my hand for some time before hastily departing. My bathtub is a throne. He had refused the tea Silver Eagle brought upstairs, where he had insisted we meet in the strictest privacy. I believe he thought I had had something to do with the assassination of the last Portuguese king.
They are selling off their silk-screens, their pots, their silver and their gold. Members of the old imperial regime. They have no shops in which to display their wares. They have no time. The time entombed within this art is irrelevant. Collectors like to argue down the price. It helps when a knowledgeable foreigner acts as a comprador, a dragoman, a translating dictionary, who can supply catalogues of these works for visiting connoisseurs. It goes without saying that catalogues too, can be inspired, tipping the scales this way or that, guaranteeing that the chinoiserie which ends up in Paris or Rome is authenticated by weighty time, by the time of Han and Sung, not by the stamped and rotten wooden frames out of which bespectacled collectors, those wily borers, have emerged, feeding off pale-faced Mandarins.
He trails along the seawall in the mornings, studying art. This has now become his specialty. The dour and down-at-heel Mandarins kowtow. They know him as a former judge with high connections. Gossip did its rounds about his trips back to Lisbon, how he took six paintings with him and returned with overflowing pockets. Untrue of course. They present their collections to him. He is their saviour, Macau the exit door for them from the terror that is still to come. Dr Sun Yat-Sen writes to him from Nanking, asking: How’s your bath? When he met up with Dr Sun Yat-Sen in Hong Kong, the future leader was on the run from someone or something. He kept looking over his shoulder, even in the China Club, where it was so dark and so heavy with teakwood beams he had every right to do so. Maybe he was thinking of carving inscriptions on the ceiling. But after their one cup of tea at the table near the bar, the great man leant over and made his excuses. His last words to Conceição were: China will be democratic, just like the bicycle. He is well established now, he informs Conceição, and was in thrall to a beautiful girl who brought him a case of Californian fruit. Chingling, her name like wind chimes, he wrote. ‘I am not sure,’ he added, ‘if it is a box of truly Californian fruit, since it arrived in Shanghai on board a Filipino mango clipper. But I was very touched and as Director of Railways, have given her a free pass – as well as several for her friends – to travel wherever they wish in the new republic. However, I would like to entice her back, and would appreciate your sending me a painting by Liu Sung-nien, whom she admires greatly. Anything by him will do, as I am well aware from your catalogues that thirteenth-century painters from the Southern Sung are being picked up for a song in Macau.’
Each morning he checks the condition of the light. Then he takes his stroll, zigzagging along the Praia, to peruse paintings. If the light is good and there is not too much haze, he should be able to see lorchas and tankas spreading bat-wing sails to make for the channel. When he looks at the paintings he sees a repetition everywhere. Ancient Chinese painting is a re-creative art. It works by appropriation, through copying and expanding. When he sees a painting that takes his fancy, he tries to buy it for a bargain price, claiming it to be a copy. Sometimes he succeeds, but when the seller doesn’t smile, when he looks seriously depressed, as though an expert has discovered something, a flaw he himself didn’t know about, then Conceição is assured that the painting is worth a lot more than he thought. He takes it home, places it on the floor in his bathroom. The floor is made of ceramic, clay and gilt-wood tiles. A Chinese parquet. He lies down in his empty bath and warms up a honey-ball and takes a pipe. Two puffs. He can only get it down to two. Sometimes he takes three. Experts only take one draw. He has his darkness and then his ecstasy. In the afternoons, when it begins to rain, he has no classes. Language is best transmitted in the morning. In the afternoons, he heats water and takes a real bath. Here he can consider the art that he has bought. Water and weather coruscate feelings, sand down romance. He takes up his brush and works over the silk, without any ink or paint, dabs and swirls over the scroll in a dry run. If it is a landscape by a good artist, he will be able to determine the moment by the movement of the master’s strokes. Rapidity. There is always a ‘moment’ in the best paintings when all is revealed. Hear the rhythm. When the weather changes, the sky turning to rain, or there is a moment of fog, perhaps it is the evening mist, then there is less contemplation in a painting. One can feel a pressing need for expression; a desire for motion, to get in out of the elements. Yet there is this resistance to action. He refuses to colour in. That would only lead to grief at the point of the original. He can feel the pulse of the master.
Chiasma
These fogbound solitudes are rare, the room’s my own for an hour before the women return with the smell of food, wet fish, all the stuff of life which makes me tremble before its generosity. I have no appetite, no stomach for the long fight with complex prose, with its inversions and crossings. Recalcitrant, I have my purchased indolence, tracing disappearing moments in the ordinariness of things: an evanescent conversation with a guest in a river pavilion; its paper walls reflect the candlelight and something primal strikes at understanding – place and fire – the placid river running beneath. A humpback bridge. See these clumps of branches forking over the cool summerhouse. I could have learned how to represent that once; heard the trout jump at dusk and fall back like a sexual sting, the slap of water, and then felt how nature undermined desire, it was so much vaster and surprising, with dark terror held in reserve. But let me attribute these paintings: to Liu Sung-Nien, to Ma Yüan, to Hsia Kuei. You may not know them, but they have hidden secret signs in their paintings. As a Freemason I know something about signs and symbols…how they work in stone. An emotion does not come upon you, but the other way round. You chance upon it because you have made it available. Because art is time mastered. Hidden there, it surprises you. Only because it has been long forgotten. A river-bend. A cracked teapot. Yet you have expected them all along. I paint The Conversation with a Guest in a River Pavilion all over again, and this time I have already invited Hannah into our scenario. I do not want to know Hannah’s other game; her other lover, her artist friend who is not her husband-to-be, scurrying into the mountain hut with her, making the best of the moment before her marriage. For the teapot at the river-bend is a sign, a warning for all of us who relinquish friends and guides and mentors…tramping through the solitary pass to our ruin…this is what is hidden within us when the weather changes: the lonely river-bend, the broken teapot.
I paint The Conversation with a Guest in a River Pavilion. The side of the wall closest to the viewer is open. It is an open conversation, the sort we carry on in a restaurant that is not crowded, so that the table over the other side can hear everything we say very clearly. The moment is a moment of secret confidence, given in friendship, to be overheard. It is a testimony to others of our sexual conviction. Currency for this moment only. They have brought the first course of minced pork patties, made from pork cheese and olives kneaded together, dipped in beaten egg and breadcrumbs and fried in butter. The musicians are setting up. They have brought in a famous erhu player, a refugee from Manchuria, whom I have specially requested. Hannah picks up her chopsticks delicately. With a cup of rice wine we begin our almôndegas. Hannah’s eyes are blue and they are sad. I catch myself in one of the Chinese mirrors on a pillar and find myself ugly. It is how things always begin. My feelings intensify because of this disparity between us. If I were handsome, love would only occur briefly. There would be no suffering. I would move on. Maidens stand at the door to the kitchen, their arms in their sleeves, singing softly. The rice wine warms my stomach. The only way I can keep Hannah in this painting is to be disinterested. I ask her about her new husband-to-be. She smiles and lies. Her eyes are wet. I pretend to look at the menu. My hands are moist, my heart is pounding. The weather outside suddenly changes. It has become achingly cold, without a wind, without a storm. Subtly, quietly, the ice maidens crack when they move. I am done with dusk. Liu Sung-Nien’s painting darkens on my clay, ceramic and gilt-wood tiles. Why am I not roused? We are served the second course, caril de camarão, shrimp curry, cooked in tamarind, chillies, saffron and paprika. But as I trace Ma Yüan’s Banquet by Lantern-light, I am no longer with Hannah but eating alone in a mountain restaurant with the mist layering above. I have forgotten my guest, and now I paint with the idea of a gift in mind. The dark peaks loom behind and their fearsome size makes me shiver and I feel that my enhancement of these historic paintings…my desecration of them through my lazy doodling, my restoration of this restaurant…they all open aspects, scenes, perspectives which I did not know were there. Dark, dark, the almond-smelling night, pine needles beneath my feet. Third course bebinca de leite, milk, sugar and lemon rind, cornflour in coconut milk, stir in egg yolks. Grilled slightly brown and cooled. I am painting over Tall Pines by a Mountain Lodge in Snow. This is not the same as copying. While copying might be a transmission of culture, painting-over is not an imitation, but a divining of the ancient master. A restoration of feelings by walking the road oneself, aware of the immense danger of destruction on one side…one false move and the original trace is gone forever…and on the other, the possession of a secret, which once acquired, can be re-used, where the true heart is a trained heart confided. My second pipe after dessert. Flurries of snow drifting under the door. I am working fast, but not up to standard. I am giving away much competence and relying on improvisation. The icy formalism of this hanging scroll has forced me to place it over the bamboo screen which partitions my room from the landing. Thus I can hear sounds of entries and exits, the social condition of my house which binds me to the world. But when there is a small movement behind the screen, a soundless step, the glimpse of a familiar earlobe which slender fingers have revealed by pushing back a strand of raven hair, I grow deaf to all save the avalanche in my chest, the subsiding snow on the opposite slope. But when she moves away from the threshold and glides down the staircase I see all the flaws in my screen, the knotted joints of bamboo, the clumsy strokes, the inability to turn the weather from rain to mist. Then a pain. Jealousy. What was she doing at that moment? What was her intention? Her time given now to others. My jalousie screens me. The discipline of work is not to hope. Hush! She returns. Her innocence before her, she waits by the opening. Normally in her nightshirt, she comes in to tell me about her day at school. She learns the things I have already taught her – how to tell the tone of a painting or a poem – between what is crisp and natural, without labour, and what is affectation. Only what you can lament, I said, was without affectation. She did not understand, but saw the tear in my eye. Mr. Crocodile, she calls me. I admonish her. It is not right, I said, to sit at the foot of my bed each night in your nightshirt, especially when your mother is out. It seemed she understood that as an affectation. And so for several nights I was able to work without interruption, stretched upon equal tensions, my moral wrack, upon this dunghill of a city. I paint without eyes. I don’t intend these works to be rediscovered; no bleaching to reveal a palimpsest beneath. She passes behind my screen again. The shine of red silk pyjamas, the little hairclip I had given her moving along the top of the lacquered partition. Without eyes, I try to absorb the moment when the painting changes. Suddenly, a drizzle, then a storm. Hsia Kuei’s Rainy Landscape: hillocks, wet foliage, misty lowlands.
Could I not have travelled to Europe instead?
Beethoven, deaf, unable to converse without signs, received his guests, two fellow musicians, I was saying to Nickel Hawk. (Yes, lightly she has come to the end of my bathtub.) He had written something. Macbeth, Beethoven had said to the others. The landscape of Macbeth. It is not Scotland; it is not China; it is a place in his head. A ghost, it refuses to disappear. They rehearse the ‘Ghost’ trio. Key of D. Flurry, then melody. The impatience of an old man. His fingers fly over the keys. On a slope, lined with trees at the top of the hill, a figure walks across a bridge. I can hear her wooden clogs. Two buckets and a bamboo pole slung across small shoulders. Warm water. She has brought warm water, pushing aside very gently the jalousie, standing now behind me, pouring the water upon my back. Second movement. I remember: I was suffering an influenza. I could not stay quiet for more than two minutes; sneezing, coughing. I timed myself with a watch. I was in London. Living in a very cold, mouseridden flat. I did not have the stamina of Baudelaire. I walked to rid myself of the ague. For miles and miles I walked. Then I walked back to Earl’s Court, where there was a small concert in progress in a small church off Kensington Road. Beethoven’s ‘Ghost Trio’. I show Nickel Hawk the importance of the painting, the change in the weather. It was hard to keep my cough under control during the recital. I had fallen into a feverish love for the violinist. I gave the last of my gold sovereigns to her after the performance.
Are you not afraid of soaking, Nickel Hawk asks, with all this steam and water and coughing? She means the paintings. I have placed them on the edge of the bath. The bamboo blinds filter steam through their ribs. Beethoven was too deaf to realise his piano was out of tune, I said, ignoring her warning. Some of the keys produced no sound at all, only a kind of muffled hammering. He heard the music only in his head and he raced, slowed, without listening for his cellist and violinist. It was horrendous. All this steam and horror. Close your eyes when you approach me in the bath, I ordered. She turned away. She turned her back. Stood at the door. ‘How can I learn about the change in painting then; the moment at which the weather in the spirit turns?’ she complains.
20
Cold. Conceição shivers. He has sent Nickel Hawk out to the shops because he needs things to inspire him. More opium from the pharmacist, from the old man with snakes in bottles, foetuses in jars. But also more of the cheap scrolls from the dime shops, for which she will have to bargain. He is teaching her. Well, how to recognise what is artless from what is art, for one thing. Is a foetus art? No, but it is a creation of the body. But Camilo (Nickel Hawk uses his name because he said it was a present for her…not even her mother, Silver Eagle herself, could do this, use his first name, for he was always Sire, or Don, or Mestre…though Nickel Hawk could only address him in private with this valued currency)…Camilo has collected the moods of his painters, capturing all those atmospheres, saving them up like slow money for use in his poetry, dark depressions which he can study and then release. Camilo said this was capital, something which Nickel Hawk thinks is very powerful, seductive, like her little budding breasts, which the old pharmacist is gleaning with his eyes, sweeping this way and that, not lingering, remarkably swift and agile, tiny black swallows, very mobile for an old, supposedly weak-sighted man, sharp wings of glances which take in pleasure from beauty; almost the real thing. Soon. Capital for her.
Conceição has not only collected paintings of dubious value since the rest of the world knows little about this period of Chinese art, but he has collected a family as well. He purchased them. Given that Nickel Hawk is turning out to be a beauty is pure luck or grief for him. Eurasian; looked down upon as a curio. A relic of historical traces to be treated with semi-respect because it is impure, though not inbred, thought to be clever, immune to diseases and above all, since it draws from disparate cultures, sexually potent, nymphomanic, highly strung, emotionally dependent. Jealous-cheating-possessive. And on the other side, seductive-sultry-passive. Conceição’s shock at the discovery that Nickel Hawk was the daughter of Silver Eagle and the Procurador has changed his feelings. He no longer has this ideal ‘secure’ little family he has purchased. She told him as much, his bartered wife. No way back when money has changed hands. But now he cannot touch Silver Eagle; I mean, he cannot bear to be near her because he imagines her thin body beneath the Procurador’s, which is oily and fat and even though he knew of her past, her lovers were faceless and he had rescued her from them; but now…now he cannot remove the Procurador’s pockmarked face from his mind and he cannot touch her, for fear of contracting a hatred for her. Jealous-cheated-alien. Silver Eagle was part of his collection. She was bought, possessed and restored. When he collected her, he purified her, saved her from being a commodity, returned to her the dignity and aura of a wife and woman. But now…what about Nickel Hawk? She didn’t even have the status of being classed among the cabritos, children of white men and half-caste women. Thinking about lineage gave him a sexual tingle; that it was possible to procreate…redeem Nickel Hawk’s pale visage, her light-coloured eyes which burned in the street…possible to save her from predatory men and rapacious history.
Desejos/Desires
I teach Portuguese with a headache, waiting for the world’s destruction, a tidal wave ringing the South China Sea to vomit up yellow silt in the corridors. The maids had to clean the floors this morning; choleric, the boys before me sick from breathing in this city of rotting cats. A cholera epidemic. Why not watch out of my window instead, the schoolgirls in their starched blouses hopscotching through the miasma with the pride of innocence?
Above the flat sea a hawk hovers, kingfishing for shrimp in translucent water made fresh by the morning tide, running with the ebb to pick stragglers off the sand, silvery crustaceans coiling, droplets of water spilling from its beak.
Yesterday, Sunday, we lay head to foot in the long bed, lazy from sunlight. In no mood to wrestle, we read instead, Robert Louis Stevenson, though I recall nothing of the story, save the way Nickel Hawk tickled my foot with her hair as she turned the pages. None of this could you call uniquely paternal love; besides, it is a long journey from ethics. And why not? The moment was given to examining the way Western culture has always presumed that the moral high ground belonged to innocence. There are millions of examples of the world not operating this way. There is no innocence in Macau.
Not going there now though. My class of boys are reciting Camões with correct pronunciation. Their voices are soft and tentative, but one day they will yell and curse, burn these poems to symbolise their independence, leave school behind, riot in the streets and then find jobs in order to dress like me and work in an office only to learn again, the correct grammar of their bosses. They will take girls who are not their wives to their beds and one by one they will return to Portugal and dream, on magnetic nights when the moon is full, sailing in their baths, nostalgic for their little beautiful cabritos and the possibility of finding pork dumplings in Lisbon.
I discard my high collar and my tie for good.
I take over the cooking, wear a long white linen gown which is soon bespattered with sauce.
For the filling: 1 onion, finely chopped; 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped; olive oil for frying; 1 teaspoon of finely sliced fresh ginger; 2 fresh chillies, finely chopped; 1 carrot, finely diced; 2 potatoes, cut into small cubes; 100 g (3½ oz, ½ cup) green peas; 1 tablespoon ground coriander; 2 teaspoons curry powder; ½ teaspoon saffron; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs. For the wrapping: spring roll wrappers; eggwhite; oil for deep-frying; cut wrapper into strips, brush with eggwhite; fold.
There you have it: chamuças. Samosas. A triangular pastry. He sits between the women at the dinner table, a concept between two raptors. They eat in total silence. Something has changed forever. He has crossed over…there is no perspective and they are confused, fearing a loss of their livelihood.
Svelte, She Appears
She wades ashore, wet.
I have a panic attack, disorientation, vertigo. Not because of her white silk pyjama suit. Not because it is filmy, translucent as a jellyfish cruising off the island of Coloane; Portuguese mano’-war, hydra-headed, trailing stings of rebuke to my liquid meditations. Out there are swimmers of the unconscious and I need to be a judge; rescue some, drown others in shameful strings of evidence. I feel protective. A life preservative. Tightly it clings. Wet, she wades.
Today I failed to go to work for good. Night sweats, a strange fever which left my extremities freezing. Let’s go to the beach! Nickel Hawk dragged me to the dinghy I kept moored near the temple. Somebody has evacuated himself in the boat, using the gunwale to hang his legs over while musing upon the sea. Never mind, turn the boat over in the shallows, retrieve it with my weak arms, lungs like gasping bellows – I try to present a strong face. Suction as we drag it out. Bail water. Clean. Catch the oar in the deep green, standing one foot on the transom, waggle out Chinese fashion.
Wet she wades, treading the ginger bottom of an old sea. Willowy, still innocent, swaying, squeezing dry her dark brown hair. She’s grown taller. I’ve failed to work today; failed to teach her, failed to write. What matter when she surprises me from behind, landing on my back with force, her breasts, her quivering heart conjoined! In the clear shallows we mime seahorses, the glittering water clouding briefly, mirroring the sky. How can I reach, she splutters, cleansing her face of all false dignity, the second level of experience? You mean in art? Of course, she sighed, knowing more than I, in this time of failure. The first level, I said, was simply the level of competence and cleverness. Hard work patching together design, scraps of beauty. The second level is to banish thought – to swim in the sea and not to know why things flow the way they do in accordance with any truth until the moment of enlightenment – it is said only men can achieve this kind of detachment after many years of meditation. She scoffed at that. Pure selfishness, she said. She was wrestling with me in the sea. I have to kill the hydra-head now, for it will grow in time. A brief braggadocio upon my moral victory. I am not Heracles. In my bathroom, much later, the clepsydra drips out its tortured timescale and my desire is stilled. The water serpent preserved in a vessel, this friend of orators, whispers a filibustering wish-wash. Today I did not go to work; I stole my life back from routine; I stole her in sleep, the never-purchased sylph who swims among jellyfish, wet and sea-salted. Oh, how I melt!
You see how his dish was presented. His confession, which is folded in a dream, served in a moment of private conversation with a blonde female guest in a river pavilion.
After that particular fugue of Conceição’s (his Dinner by Lantern-light in a River Pavilion), on the 21st of September 1916, when he imagined he was confessing to a woman of the future about his moral failure…obviously with an eye to the posterity of his poems…he would write nothing more for several weeks. He was trying to attract catastrophe. Because he saw every experience as a rehearsal, he purchased what was possible in order to make what he had rehearsed, real. He doesn’t tell you how to cook the samosas; that the filling had to be sautéed, placed in an oven at low heat etc. He wrapped what was raw. It was never meant to be the final product. He thought he had time for that; for marinading morality. He thought if he rehearsed life, his imagination would converge with reality and everything would be fulfilled and accommodated. But by not enforcing reality, by not facing it, he invited catastrophe.
He had collected more than two dozen poems at this stage and was on the verge of sending them to Hannah in Lisbon when Nickel Hawk confided to him that she was pregnant. There are no personal notes or poems which register his reactions. Nickel Hawk was confined to the house and Silver Eagle was going to pass the child off as her own. It surprised him how easily he accepted the news. He had already rehearsed all that. There was even some joy. He walked back and forth along the waterfront, among the stalls in the marketplace, talking to anyone who would listen. Yes, he was about to be a father, can you believe that! The Chinese were complimentary, some even overjoyed to hear from this foreigner who spoke such good Cantonese, that his Chinese wife was pregnant. They envied Silver Eagle; producing a son with a Portuguese man guaranteed her a golden future. They didn’t talk when they heard it was Nickel Hawk. At the blacksmith’s, the Procurador watched a cutlass being hammered out over an anvil. He was being promoted. Now, he said to the engraver, the judge is one of ours.
22
The Conceição archives yield some juvenile sketches. No, not by him.
August, 1916, sailing to China in a wooden cabin on a creaking ship, sails collapsing periodically when the wind dies, the moist, cold air eroding your face. The two women had left Sydney a week before. They are standing by the port rail, at the back of the ship, on the third deck, talking passionately, sometimes one touching the other, because this is how it works…there is the lover and the beloved, and it is the lover who instigates everything, because the beloved doesn’t need to…and perhaps is flattered rather than anything else. She touches the other on the back, kisses her cheek. One blonde, the other dark. One taller than the other. Edge closer to hear the conversation. They are talking animatedly now, their phrases catching in the wind. Nothing anyone can make out. Speaking English with a slight twang and flattened vowels. Yeh, yeh. Off to China. Intrepid women. Delphine and Hippolyte; heroines of modern travel. It is their industry that impresses. Even on board ship, one of them, the fair one, is constantly sketching. The beloved. The beloved always has time. There she is again, leaning her pad on the iron rail which smells of paint, but she is used to paint and loves the different varieties of smells so they have a colour, these odours. But on board ship she cannot drag out all her own paints. Besides, the lover doesn’t approve. Why do you have to be preoccupied all the time? Surely we can have moments of dreaming together, of laziness, of pure indolence? But the beloved cannot help herself. Her industry is pure, for no reason, perhaps simply because emptiness is a gulf for predators. They swoop. Men, women. Upon her lips. She has thin lips, which makes her fragile-looking, nervous, flighty. The lover takes this in, watching a wisp of hair drag itself across her beloved’s mouth. Despair befalls those who stoop to drink there! The lover is dark, her hair cut short, shorter than current fashion allowed. In Australia she sometimes wore a wig because construction workers on the building opposite her Kings Cross studio called her a Nancy Boy. A harsh place for women, Australia. A hostile place for artists, even though she called herself an artisan, because she didn’t believe in art for art’s sake. An impossible place for the warrior in her. Not because of her fear, but out of fear of her temper. What she might do. Her Swedish father had eaten raw seal meat off the coast of Tasmania in order to survive his geographical expeditions. He placed himself beyond them all. His wife, her mother, complained day and night, then on her deathbed, blaming her daughter for not having taken care of her. That was enough. That was the end. Her father returned to an empty house. He had a mistress but he didn’t want to lose his daughter. He gave her money. An annuity. He said: Anna, you will not extend the Ångström line, so I have had to find other means.
Motherhood. She could not bear hearing the name. All sticky blood. In France, at the potters studio in Cerbère, she starved herself. She thought that if she grew thin, she would be finished with all that blood. She fell ill and the others were worried. Meister Gleize, the cubist painter, sent for the doctor from the next village. The maestro said her work did not demand such sacrifice. Perhaps if she went home to fetch her beloved and returned next year? But then she would not return. She was starting to discover something new in France. She urged Julia Grace to investigate it fully, though she said this new thing, cubism, it was called, was ‘a domain proscribed, out of reach of photography, but still servile to architecture.’ It was becoming a favourite of Freemasons, and signalled the end of emotions. Anna wrote long letters to her uncomprehending beloved.
If only Julia could prolong this moment. Time aboard ship is always time forgotten, because it is only an interstice for the sake of the journey; a time for the goal of arriving. That is why she is making every moment count. Look at the way Anna stares at her, kisses her, looks out across the water in a dark sea change. Julia tries to avoid the plenitude of time, which is always a gulf. Only the moment counts. She turns her back upon the sea and rests her folio on the canvas cover stretched tight over a lifeboat. She thinks of her sheep farm, her mother, the maids, an isolated, genteel life. She believes in Anna’s politics, especially when the latter says women needed to be freed from the price of their bodies. Only then could a woman be truly creative. Julia really does believe, but knows the price of the body is still there, whether paid for by men or by women.
Julia Grace leans over the lifeboat and sketches. She appears very beautiful at that moment and shivers slightly in the moistened air of a sea-stroked dusk. Anna places her cape around her beloved’s shoulders and leans over her to see what she has drawn. She has sketched a portly man wearing braces and a red bow tie, sporting an enormous mane of greying hair, looking anxious and worried at the opposite rail, his right thumb stroking his moustache, a cigarette between his pudgy fingers, looking equally ostracised and equally vulnerable, as though he’d just been surprised on the toilet.
Violin Arcades
Every morning I check the condition of the light over the Pearl River Estuary. I am mostly disappointed at the verses I disgorge – shrimp scurrying towards the fake glimmer of love. I buy paintings, bargain for the right price. The quality is dwindling now, the lesser known, lesser works of jaded masters. I understand the way they offered themselves, took on prostitution for a basketful of fish. They had to eke it out, salted fillets of their talent, desiccated in the noonday heat. And so I elaborate, varnish their stroke with mine, and being word-obsessed, write catalogues for their enhancement.
I collect dogs as well. Three or four small ones. Pekinese varieties. Jars and vases, porcelain and bronzes. Nickel Hawk frets at home…she’s started vomiting…but now Silver Eagle takes an interest in the fact my father has passed on, leaving me seven thousand miles away, much richer than when I first arrived. My birds enlarge the house preparing for more prosperity, though they are forbidden to remove my rolls of Chinese paintings rotting against the humid masonry in my secret rooms, my soul. I have become a reprobate.
The Procurador’s son came one day, a simulacrum of his father, oiled with baby fat. He offered to buy the best preserved paintings, but I exaggerated the prices, turning mediocre works into masterpieces, and in the end I bought his concubine instead, having once glimpsed her swaying in the old arcades in the central shopping district, her silk quipao split to reveal perfectly formed, perfectly normal feet, her toenails painted. She went cheaply because of them. Even small deformities fetched greater prices. She will be Nickel Hawk’s companion and nurse. She walked behind me. She was tall and willowy. The crowds pushed us together and the human heat formed a foetid bath. Macau was a material and moral rubbish heap. I felt her small pointed breasts cushioning my earlobes. At the markets she blinked uncomprehendingly and fondled the dogs and smiled. I name her Number Three. Later on she will take on the name of ‘Peregrine’ rather than concubine. This higher status as mistress (involving emotional attachment) entitles her to a share of my possessions. She only told me later that she had been married before and had come upon difficult times. She bore the rather aristocratic name of De Rivière. A first husband, you see, who was French. Who abandoned her of course, when he went back to Europe, gloriously eligible, already thin with cancer. My son by Nickel Hawk, whom I will call the Monkey, will adopt her name instead of mine. You see what vipers we bring into the world. A whole zoo. I allowed the Peregrine to bring her mother to the house and then I found that she had a sister, who shared her room. Her mother had a cousin, who shared the former’s little quarters near the back of the courtyard. I built more rooms, hired coolies for the job, selected the stone myself from the pile of rubble left by the foreshore where dissidents had blown up a statue of a former governor. The Conceição Fortress. Silver Eagle is not happy at all.
I yearn to be transformed by something more than sex. In a house now surrounded by trees and women, I lie like Marat in tepid water waiting for rising jealousy to disgorge violence, a woman who would plunge a knife into my convulsing chest with professional detachment. My sheets are holed with burning cigarettes, I keep my opium near. The canopied bed rocks on high seas, its mast bearing a crown and two brass fish. In the spring my son will be born. We will name him Macau Conceição. A rhyme at least; Macau being a gambling game. Such eponymy; such economy. Little Macau, my dusky baby-chance, will be known by the unfortunate diminutive of Macaco or monkey, and will officially be registered as the son of Silver Eagle and Camilo Juanzinho Pereira Conceição.
23
15th February 1917
Dear Family,
Anna and I have finally arrived in Hong Kong. To think that it has taken almost three weeks at sea to get here! We stopped at Timor, Makassar, Manila, and it got more and more crowded as we steamed north. I am fine, but poor Anna took ill with fever and was laid up for days. It was rumoured she ate a bad pork sausage. She’s a lot better now. Hong Kong is a haven for English speakers. An English doctor saw to her and she recovered almost overnight…left me with the freedom to wander alone…ate noodles at a stall and watched a Chinese opera…they were trying to sell me vases and wooden boxes in the back lanes, claiming them to be antiques…but the whole idea of antiquity is not well known, indeed it is invented, and there is a strange collapsing of time and treasures to be had…
The prose is unnoteworthy, but you can see Julia Grace starting to think on her own…you can see from this letter that there are aphasic moments, points de suspension, into which she vertiginously falls. She is curious. She wanders alone in a foreign place which is not known to be safe for young blonde women. A smiling Chinese man approaches. The alleyway is dark, full of squatting hawkers eating rice, smiling, the grains falling from their lips which they retrieve from the ground, trying to interest her in their teapots and jewellery, pathetic mounds of beaten tin, coloured glass shards strung into necklaces sitting beside the cat shit. The young man has very smooth skin, as smooth and unaccented as his English. His breath is warm with herbal cigarettes and mounds of vapour erupt from his mouth to caress her hair. He says he will take her to Macau, where there is very fine art to be collected. Not this rubbish. His smile seems honest. She says she will think about it; she will consult with her friend. You see, there were two of them and two would not be easy to deceive or to rob. The young man will appear at the door of their hotel in the morning. And the two women, yes, the Australians, would have already taken the early ferry to Macau.
As the steamer slows, entering the middle harbour in Macau waters, a sampan appears, trolling a rope in its wake. Two women, one with a small baby, are calling to passengers leaning over the rail to buy some of their bric-à-brac. Humid scrolls depicting river gorges. Copies, no doubt. Reproduced daily. Bronze pots, brass fish. Anna waves them away. Anna uses her deep-throated laugh to indicate scorn for their wares. But Julia begins to bargain over a painting. A rainy landscape. She uses her fingers to indicate the price. Anna tells her not to be fooled. Julia persists in the game, but Anna is the heroine of communism, disavowing trade, erecting her moral and infernal dominance over her friend and lover, she waves back Julia’s arm which extends over the side holding out a coin. They’re not beggars, Anna scolds. But Julia is already making a testament. The divine ordinance to shed one’s possessions is medieval, but it is also the opposing half of the collector. God’s voice: dispersal and reclaiming. The coin clatters onto the deck of the steamer and as she retrieves it, the package of letters she had been gripping under her arm is released. Julia was hoping to give them back to Anna. Letters amongst letters. Anna’s letters to her from Paris, from Cerbère, from Port Bou. Her own letters which she had kept from sending. She thought of destroying them. She had bundled them together but now they were all scattered and they floated down upon the two women in the tiny boat. Anna’s entreaties. Julia’s rebuffs. Freud would have said Julia’s unconscious acted of its own accord. She was not comfortable with this evidence, even though she was a collector. The beloved acts; a teasing, spoilt child. Anna shouted. Ahoy! Can you give them back? The fisherwomen had already examined them and had put them into a basket in their sampan, thinking of throwing a rope up to them, but suddenly their tiny boat was dislodged from the wake of the ferry and the foreign women held up their hands in a gesture of futility as the sampan turned and sliced towards outlying islands.
All those formalities at the customs house. Green uniforms, red braid. Julia attracted gallants with moustachios, leering, smelling of cigarillos; obrigado; she smiled; she had no Portuguese; they could be saying anything to her and for a brief moment, the thought of a rough man above her – surprisingly, for the thought crept up out of pure fancy to dare and challenge Anna’s propriety, her Edith Sitwell eccentricity, mad staring down of rough men, her superior look which men often received with disgust the moment they sensed that kind of business…if you like that sort of thing was the remark they made – the thought of coarseness excited her; but for the moment there were smiles all round. They brought her a single rose. No, letters. Lost letters. They understood. The post, they said was very efficient. The women were catching a pedicab because they thought sedan chairs a demeaning practice. The rider looked half their size, pulling them through the soup of human bodies, laila, laila, laila, he shouted, threading his tricycle through the laneways up the hill with their boxes, to the Pousada San Francisco; a quick bath, separately, this was understood, bathing together not yet on the agenda, and some champagne out on the balcony listening to the cries from the hawkers and the Chinese water clock dripping below in the lobby, the humidity still cruel.
24
In his room a street away, Camilo Conceição lit up a third pipe, his poetry a bluish flame on the page. How could expression look so fake when examined? Words caught like insects in sticky ectoplasm. He hated his words. Baudelaire’s ghost stuck to it so he couldn’t think originally. Glued to the past which was also the future. He would be humiliated. He could see it all: Hannah’s support for him; her defence of what others will call forgery, because it was always the words of others which he purchased, like the women he purchased, like the child, which was his, certainly, suckling now at Nickel Hawk’s sore breasts, darkened by his own gummy lips; the child: which he had already seen greedily sucking everything from him, because it had a claim on him. He had no wish for any social approval. Caught in this sticky amber. There was no going back to a social world. No return to Lisbon where others will hoot at his insect aspirations while licking their fingers and turning the pages to explore his lascivious maidens from the East. Paris-Macau. Baudelaire-Conceição. It almost rhymed. He drew on his tattered shirt and walked outside and he was as one who was sleepwalking, shuffling blindly up the street along the Praia a tremulous hand against the low stone wall. Then the revulsion. The crowd hemming him in, elbowing him, slowing his flight; the future will dispense with him; the future was this crowd, spitting him out. The walk from his room where Baudelaire’s handless clock sits on his night table, to the clepsydra in the lobby of the hotel across the street where he will take his morning coffee, is a journey that takes more than one lifetime.
On the way, he gave alms to beggars. He wore no shoes. He could not act other than to give alms while dressed as a beggar himself. It purified him; gave him the sensation of levitation. His alms-giving had caused much pain in the household. Silver Eagle scolded and nagged him. The Chinese don’t give alms, she said, unless it is to help their family. The clan. He hated the idea of the clan. Selfishness began at home. One day Silver Eagle, dressed as a beggar, wearing a torn, black veil over her head, stood in rags before the soot-smeared façade of the Saõ Paulo cathedral. When Camilo gave her a coin, she drew off her veil. He was outraged. He was about to slap her. She stepped back and he caught her by the arm, shaking her. So typically Chinese of her, he shouted at the top of his voice so that real beggars scattered along with the pigeons. He understood at that moment that the poet in him had turned into a monster.
He dragged himself to the little courtyard at the front of the hotel where they served coffee in the mornings on bamboo tables over which the flies hovered hot and lazy, making a soft blue sound. He sat down, looked behind to eclipse his shadow, rubbed out the monstrous double weighing him with meaninglessness: um cómico defunto: a dead comedian, playing at poverty. Baudelaire’s dark humour welled up from real destitution. His own, from the stage. Water was falling over a stone wall…up above, someone hidden in the shrubbery with a watering can. He sat there until the waiter came and took his order, a boy in a white jacket with gold buttons like those worn by sailors. Conceição smoked. Little cigarettes he rolled himself, anxious to fill time with the fragrance of pleasant memories. Remember love? he asked himself. No, he could not, except as a monstrous laugh at the non-existent reason for his having once loved. Fatuous now. Hannah’s hips melting into middle age. Then what he thought was love…momentarily, when he caressed Silver Eagle’s breasts, tiny bulbs he tweaked as she presented her back to him like a boy. Then Nickel Hawk’s ministrations. Now Peregrine’s expert mouth. The Falcon. All of these did not constitute love. He was a non-lover. He could not fall because he could not feel. Not even the swipe of a cutlass from behind. But he could experience the sound of the drops of water from the clepsydra, the slowly revolving barrel atop the paddlewheel, its pointer running along the marked hoops, a device which could not find the time, but simply marked out rough duration, a set period in which he had to establish himself. Someone will see. Someone will protect his future. He had no fear of dying.
He was nursing his cognac. There they were coming down the stairs into the courtyard, the dark woman and the fair one. Conceição looked and turned away so as not to appear curious and then looked again. By God! It was Hannah. He rose, he ran, stumbled, knocked over the chair he was sitting on, Hannah! So you’ve finally come! She winced, frowned. His was a kind of delusion which often occurred in the East. It came with gin and tonic. It was particularly common in fair weather, when there was no other drama. But it was the dark one who spoke first. One does not know you, sir. He recovered his composure just in time. Desculpe. Mistook you for somebody else. But the blonde was smiling at him. She spoke in English. A strange lilting tone. No, it is we who have disappointed you Sir. Were you expecting to meet a friend? A friend? He chewed over the word. No. My dear Senhõra, I am so sorry. A friend. I have lost all my friends.
And so began a conversation, broken by so many translations, mis-translations, smiles, apologies. He invited them to have coffee but they declined. He asked if he could smoke, and they said to go ahead. This gave him confidence. You see, he said, a smoke is a friend. They smiled at this. She was an interesting one, the blonde. She was daring, and was quick to take up any hint of intimacy. When he said he was a teacher, she grew attentive and invited him with her eyes to linger over the story of his life. He said he was washed up, here in Macau, a bit of flotsam. She did not say she collected flotsam whenever she was on Sydney’s foreshores, trawling the wet sand when the tide had just gone out, picking up bits of crockery, splinters from sunken ships. They agreed to meet for dinner.
25
Conceição in his Forbidden City with his concubines. He escaped it, took his daily walks swimming in an opium high, a rausch rushing through his veins. How could he possibly have written poetry? But there they are. Published in 1926 by Hannah Osório de Castro. When did he write them? They must have come in a rush, their beauty insurmountable, the time bomb of their symbolism, his devastating attack on industrialisation, his identification with his mother, his ambiguity. The Water Clock Poems. He wanted to slow down time. And yet it all occurred in a rush, in a lather of sweat, with a cold wind coming off the sea. He had to get through the portal of redemption, opening up for him like a passage through the water, waves held back for him, the Garden appearing green in the distance. How had he managed this, having forsaken Lusitania, a deserter by no other name, a decadent, an ugly duckling, a purchaser of concubines, he who called his little son a monkey, he who was a failure as a judge, he who taught languages with the dryness of a grammarian, lazy to the bone, slanderer of his father, imperial coloniser, pederast… how did he manage this poetry?
They met that evening for dinner at the Pearl River Pavilion. He, pale, in a cream suit which was too small and tight for him, but which showed off his posture, straight and stiff, a gentleman of the old Lusitanian establishment, or so he tried to appear. His mouth had been somewhat blackened by opium, so he rouged his lips. Grotesque. Anna was not in favour of this dinner. She would insist on paying for her share, of course. It was the Australian way. Pay as you go, but only for yourself. Grand gestures were not her specialty. Impressions were not part of her interest. Julia, however, convinced her that if they wanted to look over some paintings, those reputed to have some value, then they were to be polite to Conceição at all times. They let him pay. Julia was rather impressed by his attempts to scrub up during his several visits to the bathroom. She was wearing her blue dress, her transparent muslin, her little box hat. He smoked between courses, after advising them against the cod, which he said had been caught too close to the effluent shore. His little cigarillos. Anna turned away from his smoke. Julia inhaled it. During dessert Julia suddenly exclaimed: A writer! As though she had just discovered the only true one in the world. Anna rolled her eyes. Yes, Conceição admitted for the first time that he wrote poetry. Not to anyone, but only to one woman; to her perhaps. Ha! Anna scoffed. But I am listening. He ignored her. No, his discourse was directed to Julia, whom he was finding to be marvellously in tune, laughing at his compressed irony, quick to pick up his suggestions of double entendres and she was thrilled to be talking with someone who did not perform the literal act day after day, throwing pots from earth, submerged in earth, dedicated to clay, playing at being an earthmother. But she wasn’t interested in making Anna jealous. No, that was already too catastrophic, since Anna once exhibited such fury she claimed Julia was nothing but a puppy, or worse still, a pussy, which (yes, the impersonal became her), was nothing better than a feline with loose lips and a tight sphincter. Fired up, Anna had a way with words. Pots flew. Shards littered the studio in Kings Cross. Julia however, could not help herself. This ugly man opposite her was playing a terrible sadness upon flowery jokes. On her father’s station once upon a time there was an Aboriginal man who possessed the same physiognomy: wide nostrils, dark beard, and he sat on the stoop at the back porch relating sorrow in broken English. A well-worn tale. Not his, but hers for the telling. Now this Conceição, refined, educated, with the same pathos. He spoke as though he had no choice in the loss of his profession as a judge in Coímbra. In Portugal, he said, it was impossible to possess a sense of literary nobility. A poet feels, he went on to say, at his own expense. Yes, she agreed, but an artist works. Anna tried to add something here, but they were not listening. I feel, he said, always under the light of others. As if the lantern of brilliance they concealed under a bushel was what I tried to imitate with my little candle. Only I set fire to my bed. Speech, you see, disfigures everything. She was laughing – a generous laugh which revealed dimples and charms and an even row of white teeth. He had not had such a conversation since Hannah’s muted rejection of his work. The latter would probably continue to turn it aside. He was not depressed for it was not his best work. He admitted all this to Julia. Anna looked as if she were going to throw a tantrum or a pot. She was bored. There was no conversation with this man. He did not see her. He was not impressed by her mind. So she let it be known she didn’t like poetry. She didn’t like poets. She then said she would walk back to the hotel slowly. Julia did not like the adverb at the end of her sentence. Take all the time you want, she said and she saw Anna’s face flush with anger. They all rose. Then, in a moment of independence she hadn’t exercised before, Julia said Camilo would walk her back later, wouldn’t he? Conceição bowed. He would be delighted. They would take a detour via a tea-house by the river.
None of this would have come about without reflection and meditation on Julia’s part. For months she had been imprisoned by Anna’s will. For years she had suffered the older woman’s experience and jealous scorn. Julia was always frightened of the conversations Anna had when others were present. There was always a moment when Anna would turn to her and say: But, my dear, the large canvas does not suit you. Your cigar-box lids are perfect. You are what you appear to be, small and perfectly formed. Or something to that effect. It was however, Julia’s personal fortune that supported both of them. Travelling the world on the sheep’s back.
Reminder: the word ‘baudelaire’ was a kind of cutlass. And it was probably during that night, while taking coffee with Julia, pausing between each mouthful to reveal a black cavern, the rouge of his lips imprinted on the rim of the cup…it was probably then that he cut himself off from Baudelaire. For Julia did not find him repulsive. She saw in him a beauty which was not illegitimate; an honesty. She urged him to move from second-hand poetry to lived composition. You must act, she told him, you must use your despair. That is when you will regain your happiness.
The moment he got home, having escorted the blonde painter back to her lover’s room, the moment he heard the women of his household shifting uneasily in their apartments… rumours were already abroad: A white concubine!…at that moment, he began a poem without Baudelaire. He cast his opium pipes aside. The poppies had been lopped, but now he heard a single flower opening in the night. His fight had not been useless.
Day of Useless Agonies
The day of agonies is over; its egress marked by the title on this cover: The Water Clock Poems: thin wings of words, hymens easily broken, pains of love. I abandoned Baudelaire, and immediately the day of useless agonies passed from my burnt-out mouth. He had always feared women, most of all intelligent ones. He said he ‘slept with a hideous negress’, because he could not perform, counterfeiting his limpness with feigned boredom. What a face. I was his negress. I am leaving him now. I live my hell without recourse to doubling, double-dealing with him. I left Les Fleurs du mal with Julia, my only copy of it, worn from the pressure of my hand in countless failed attempts to learn from him. It must have been Julia’s resemblance to Hannah which made me want to give her something. I thought the book my inspiration, but now I know it was my failure. Something which I had always carried around. A personal millstone; portable gallows.
I left her lucid and pale beside people dying in doorways and threw her one of those kisses into which I would have thrown my life, as water in the grand harbour swirled and lights from rickshaws glimmered upon her teeth and a young man coughed up blood in my path. Down from the blackened façade of the São Paulo cathedral, burnt down in 1601, a night-bird swooped. One by one, Chinese lanterns up in the hills were slowly extinguished. The night settled in close. On our walk, Julia, slightly drunk, told me she practised body building on the family farm, out of sheer boredom. Hoisted hay bales and steel rails like a navvy and in a lather, in solitary self-confinement, released herself. And yes, beneath her coat she placed my hand and I examined like a doctor the shapes of muscles hardening and softening.
Lucid and pale, I stood on the threshold of a sickened city while he passed his hand across the sky, brow burdened with verses penned before and better penned. I’m just a girl in a bustle sewn with stars, simple in design, fine for the night-walk and did not see the dirt beneath my feet. As we lingered upon a seat by the arcades in Sintra he came alive and was not shy, his finger stalling, just once, between Venus and then Mars.
26
In his room, alone, in the small hours of the morning, he unwraps the little parcel of her letters, purchased from the fisherfolk he knew, for a bargain. This was what inspired The Water Clock Poems.
He had not been able to act because he had no desire save the desire to die. Reality disappointed…he had seen everything already, the end coming out of a new century, the muscles of an avenging angel, her name given to an act he had already rehearsed but never fulfilled, and it was by this grace that he was still alive that night, given back to life. Useless except in reverie, only seeing between wakefulness and sleep, the way she took his hand a revelation to him, a lead, a guide, he was no longer a man. He was given a parcel of letters by a comprador; they had been scattered on the sea and were now collected and dried like fish. Out of these he plotted his path, a poetry which had become a duty. His act of contrition for his guilty secret.
There was a murderous dew that night. He wrote poem after poem to the drip of water while sitting in his Mosely folding bath. Roughs, which he will later rework for weeks and months. But for the moment they poured out without a subject, or at least it was a subject invisible to him. He had invited Julia to visit him in the late morning and he wanted to have something to show her. She had assented, but hinted that it would be a difficult permission to obtain. Permission! He took that to heart, too pained to ask if it were only a figure of speech. But he had imagined the stranglehold the older woman had over her. The woman of the world. He had imagined, when he wrote that night, the words: Obscene hydra, under the weight of my virginity! What did he mean by that? Guilt crushed under the heel of blindness? The water serpent of fantasy reaching into territory he did not know? He was hardly innocent. Mea culpa, strike your chest, pectorals, peccata mundi. Behind him, through his window, the lonely harbour lights. He sat there bleating, that was what he called this, his writing, a call to be succoured, something which had never left him. He was compelled to reassess the present: Silver Eagle downstairs entertaining another man before going out; Nickel Hawk waking and rocking her baby, his little monkey, whose hands he already imagined would rip his life from him, a child he would not educate, her child, and though Nickel Hawk showed the promise of a felt life, there was no hope; not in this city; nor was there anything he could call upon in Portugal, for it simply could not be done, to return with such baggage…it was for their sakes…and so it was all hopeless, plaintive as the Peregrine’s snoring in the third room, a woman of some means who wore all her wealth in her teeth. He sat and wrote bravely, fragments of fantasy which had neither adornment nor false feeling. That, he was satisfied, was his truth: kaleidoscopic shards which tumbled together, forming new perspectives: Julia’s breasts a template upon which the Romans had modelled their armour, and she, neither passive nor aggressive, softly disturbing his erotic field with whispers, bending flowers in the tumid night and then his drooping disinterest (opiate induced) activated by the process of a switch on her hardened buttocks, suddenly Anna there, the cold punishing light of a distant star and he could only watch, his eye behaving telescopically; leave it to them beneath the dim light bulb: Grace under Ångström; his bathwater freezing; everything measured, tempered, alone again.
27
There he is, coughing up blood, sitting now by his window which looks out onto the Praia. He has contracted a germ from the crowd, two months after Julia Grace and Anna Ångström left Macau on board the Finca, bound for Lisbon. Lonely, these two months, filled with work, filled with blood, his lungs, trying to relieve the congestion with iced red wine, consumption he thought he could cure, red for red, but was only concealing it with colour. Must have been the sewer gases, miasmas, horse manure, human faeces which passed it on. But his angel had left him, bound for Europe on the Finca. He could only recall the way she smiled when they took their last walk together, saying that spontaneity and improvisation in art were ways to mask intention. He was not quite convinced. He could see it in her, that muscular strength forcing her material to bend to her will. To be mastered by her! That was the intention of his poetry. But there was something else. Taste. You could not write unless you had taste. His mouth grew blacker. He was triangulating the positioning of his house. He had bought a painting, a rather mediocre early one of the Macau waterfront. He wanted the perspective; how to accommodate a view from an illogical standpoint; the Eastern mind sees what it wants to present, not as accuracy, but as the truth of the artist’s intention. He brought out his Freemason’s compass. His telescope, the thousand-li-mirror is what the Chinese call it. Its range is probably about thirty li. Art is measuring. His reckoning was that Macau’s art markets were located in a double triangle. Side by side, like the frame of a bicycle. At the apex, the crumbling gambling houses on the rua Nova de São Lazaro, where rich crime bosses dealt out dirty money and cheap, plywood coffins. At the bottom, there was the waterfront in the inner harbour, where items were sold, brought in on sampans: paintings by ancient masters, lyrical elegies from the Ming dynasty, scrolls of calligraphy in blazing red which Camilo had bought for two patacas. In his big house near the Boa Vista, there were fifteenth-century screens and panels, priceless porcelains, seascapes in sandalwood. Triad gang-members lolled about outside his door. They knew nothing about art, but were learning the market. He wrote catalogues for them.
When she visited him that memorable evening, Julia had brought lilies. There was nowhere to put them. The rooms were chaotic, spread with paintings, dogs lying on couches, cats stretching. What he thought was an intimate environment must have seemed like a ramshackle clutter of junk and chaotic collection. It was not the house of a lawyer, judge, teacher. It was an extravagant pile of guano belonging to an eccentric gatherer of waste. There you have it. What Julia would have seen and heard: a cacophony of Chinese voices and barking dogs, flapping chickens. Indeed, when she visited, she wrote that there were probably fifteen souls living there. Mainly female, with their squalling babies, their itinerant, extended families, helpers, loan sharks, hangers-on, prostitutes. Scratchy Chinese opera music came from a back alleyway. A smell of cat urine. For a poet, it was not reflective of calm or meditation. Reflexion, he told her, was a nightmare he chased down in order to extort from it a pleasant dream in daylight hours. He was hurriedly writing something down. Hollow sounds of dripping water from somewhere in his room; saliva sizzling in his bamboo pipe. Julia showed her disgust. She didn’t know about his refuge. She didn’t wish to know. By the look of his morning attire, he could not have possessed a bathroom. She didn’t conceal her views, just said his house was a kind of rotting birthday cake…a bat cave…those were her words. She apologised for her plain speaking. Australians had a democratic tendency to criticise what they did not understand. For his part, he collected women and progeny. He was kind to them. He called them unfinished fragments. They always had hope and they weren’t out for closure. He was against what Julia stood for; not her sexuality, which excited him, but her persistent need to acknowledge her bourgeois tendencies. She asked him straight out what he was going to do with his collection. He said he had already bequeathed it to the National Museum in Portugal, but that he also favoured the idea that a part of it should go to the Paris gallery whose curator had befriended him and who had helped him find Baudelaire’s rooms. He patronised Julia. Did not allude to their intimacy. The fact that she presented herself as a conscious artist from an English colony, devoted to work at all costs, unremitting in discipline – she hardly perspired, it seemed – her ambition to be seen as an artist – this fact demanded scepticism. This seemed to him false, betraying the artist with the idea of an artist. She was coming to the stage from the wrong side of the curtain, and while her upbringing brought her much confidence, her beauty gave him pause. Beauty could not bring about art. He did not say all this to her. A single look was enough.
28
The anti-royalist was dying, surrounded by his mistresses and their extended families. He no longer received visitors in his antechamber. He asked them to visit him in his room, while he sat in his bath which Nickel Hawk or Silver Eagle periodically filled with warm water, and Number Three, the Peregrine, who was now promoted to preparing and lighting his pipes because she had strong and steady hands, glided in and out, making sure his visitors did not tire him, all those bureaucrats and aspiring writers who had got wind of this house of death in which, still lived, so they had heard, Baudelaire’s equal.
He would not have coped with that. Grimaced beneath the beard, probably. There was always, even amongst those he called friends, the great dead writers on his shelves, a usage. The human being was manufactured. He wrote that in one of his letters to Hannah. You could hear and see his doubles emerging from the telephone, the gramophone, the camera. He was very concerned about his young son, he wrote, because there is a stigma attached to being a Creole. He knew how Nickel Hawk felt the moment she began to understand painting; her fear and panic at the notion of enlightenment. Now he began to tell her of her origins. She was creolised, a product of her mother and the Procurador, lacking both direction and a racial passport. It alarmed her. She was suddenly dispersed and reconstituted. Her next steps would be ingratiation, passing, then dissolution. She would become a prostitute. It happened to the best of them. What about her son? Conceição saw everything in advance. He had nightmares about the little monkey growing wise, robbing him of everything in the house, selling the collections. Macaco the monkey would set up a little business with what was left from squandering all the money on gaming tables, starting a dark and dingy bicycle business in the red-light district on the rua da Felicidade. This was his copy. He might even grow a black beard. Make himself all the more recognisable amongst the Chinese as a foreign devil. Then he will try to ‘pass’ by claiming European identity, enabling him to borrow money more easily. He will not like people asking about his race. A face like teakwood. Every morning he would swim the channel between Taipa Island and Coloane. He was proud of his gloomy bicycle-repair shop erected under an awning beside the Senate buildings; proud of the colorful posters advertising bicycle brands stuck on the back wall…Omnium, Onyx, Orient…he had come from nowhere…he was not an artist like his father. Women found him interesting nevertheless, balancing themselves on his bikes, giggling, chatting. He would tell them how he was born in a pedicab, his thin-hipped mother rushing to the midwife in the middle of the night, a lantern at her feet next to his protruding head, foreigners whistling, hailing them to stop, believing she was touting. Yes, he said, he was half a bicycle. They were welcome to ride him.
Conceição had fallen in love with Julia Grace. She had been horrified at his circumstances, intrigued by his ‘savage riches’ as she described them in one of her letters to him…an interestingly intimate letter, apologising for her initial reaction, her forthrightness at such squalor and grandeur before she was able to assess his priceless paintings, his antique furniture, his ancient ornaments and scrolls. Her collector’s eye had been clouded by his women, her covetousness confused, blushing helplessly when Silver Eagle stared her down. She had been ushered in by Nickel Hawk, through two museum salons which were impressive despite the dogs and cats and chickens, and she turned right, following the girl, whom she mistook for his daughter, and she brushed aside the drapes which Nickel Hawk had let fall onto her face and saw him in his bath with the yellow screens behind and the untidy bookshelves and the cupboards full of jade vases, jars, porcelains and bronzes, and there were paintings stacked against the wall, damp from the steam of his bath. His tub folded back into a wardrobe with a mirror, revealing a sodden Persian rug, the whole affair arranged along one wall of the large room. They had a long discussion while she sat beside his bath and Silver Eagle poured in water and the Peregrine, swaying and willowy, lit his pipes. They spoke about drugs and then about fugues. He said he was peripatetic, prowling around the back streets, lost in the vortex of the city, but now he was tired more and more, his urban revolutions smaller, his map marginal. He was coughing up flecks of blood onto his handkerchief. She was caught between disgust and her fascination with his silken women, intrigued by their indifferent silence. She suggested buying some of his collection…the paintings, of course. Outside, beyond the shuttered windows the city exuded an unhealthy mist, fermented the air with decay, tang of wet markets, fish stalls closing for the night, cobbles gleaming with blood and silver scales. She had walked here and the hem of her dress was still damp against her boots and she had had to elbow her way through a thick soup of people, thinking of her farm at a place called Putty, in New South Wales, Australia, where there was always the health of the grain, wet wool of sheep, the sweetness of silos bursting with store, flavours of roasting lamb and the sharp crackling of red gum burning in the grate, and no people, and she thought of that peace which was not here, the stillness of the night and the proximity of the stars.
When they were alone he began to speak more eagerly about his dry-brush copying, the hand revealing the will, the experience, he said, of traversing the same road as those Chinese masters, a true imbibing of the weather, and that was what it was like with his poetry. Julia then saw sadness, a windblown shade come upon his face when he spoke about his son, of the fate of those born out of wedlock, the perfilhados – perfidious, he claimed, sons without faith – so they always turned out – for the very reason that in Macau they had the same rights as their fathers. The monkey was on his back, pushing him one rung further down into the grave. The son was his copy and would extinguish him; and then his son, and then his son. Brush him out. He wanted to put himself out of reach. She wanted to show him that he was wrong, bring him to another place where there was the sweetness of timber and the crispness of air, the inhalation of life and taking the washcloth from the side of the tub she began slowly to wash him, first his feet which he had propped on the rim, and then his shoulders and his thinning hair and as the water became more tepid, knew refilling was a disturbance, a displacement of pleasure taken from the alreadydead, and so she submerged her hand beneath where there had been no more feeling and brought him to the present. It was the one thing for which there was no correction. The rest is history. The clepsydra dripped.
29
There is a very small entry in Anna Ångström’s diary, which was left behind in the studio at Cerbère…fortunately rescued by the patriarch of the artistic community…the small entry made on the 5th January 1928, almost two years after Anna had visited Macau, which does have the ring of truth about it, indicating a mystery which had not yet been digested, since all jealousies and betrayals entail consequences and speculations which become more lucid with time…the entry of the 5th January 1928 notes that:
…something had happened to Julia…it was most certainly the result of an encounter with that awful Rasputin. They had met three times in our short stay and even though Julia made it quite clear that she was on a mission that was purely business, I could not quite trust her. I’m not sure if I was jealous, for time has passed quickly and I cannot remember if she had been disloyal, though I knew that deep in her heart she was not that way inclined. I therefore began to suspect her motives. Why she was spending time, for example, with a man who was at the end of his minor career as a poet? A man at the limits of his talent, who admitted to her that he was always having to make such a mental effort with modernity he could never return to Europe. A man who hated everything about modern art, since we were sailing towards the future: modernism; cubism; surrealism. That Camilo creature knew nothing of what was going on in France. He had gone backwards into Chinese painting and exclaimed during our one brief meeting at dinner…an event I was fortunate not to have to repeat… that he was ‘always looking for midday at two o’clock’. Passé. He was absolutely passé in his thinking. A man of the past who destroyed the past. A passéiste who painted cheap advertisements over once worthy canvases. A man who believed in symbols of commodity, who fathered children indiscriminately and who bought women for his pleasure.
My suspicion of Julia began that day we set sail, when she suddenly expressed the desire to go home. Indeed she only spent a month at Cerbère and it was a desperate month for both of us, for we argued constantly and Meister Gleize had to counsel me for what was rapidly turning into nervous exhaustion. A break-up, as it now turns out. But Julia was running back home. I know how she would have waited breathlessly at the post office at Putty, waiting for news of him in that Australian heat.
If only Julia knew that Conceição was raving mad by this time. He sent the Peregrine to bring him his pipes. He liked the honey colour of the Macau Opium Farm brand. Long after Julia had departed he asked Nickel Hawk to put lilies in a vase. He said they were grown in a honey-coloured valley. He directed her to it, somewhere in the heart of China. Nickel Hawk said there were no lilies. The woman with the lilies had left a month ago. No, Miss Grace will do it herself, Conceição said, and filled the vase with bathwater. He saw the flowers being nourished. Autumn is gone now, the cold returns…he wrote of her as Ophelia, her hands translucent and cold beneath the water.
In the mornings he walked as far as he could but suffered from a chronic pain in his joints, a pressure behind his nose, a head that would not tell the time. The walking was all there was – a forward movement towards a narrowing gap. He walked barefoot in his long indigo nightshirt like a beggar, zigzagging between people, crossing and recrossing the streets out of some superstition that buildings may collapse, tiles may come tumbling down, for catastrophe may occur at any time. The world was discontinuous. He walked barefoot to feel the state of the ground, to detect the fine tremors of future earthquakes, to configure his position with regard to the earth because he felt he had come to the end of his time and this ending was fortuitous, and his bare feet felt the cold stones and the coldness gave him back something that was not entirely wasted. The thought of the gift of his death lightened him; released him from another rehearsal of a life in which he would be overcome by ambition all over again. It would only be at the last moment – when he became discontinuous, when he had already fostered discontinuity, having fathered useless words and children – it would only be at the last moment that he would find that this imitation of life had no meaning; except for his taking revenge on the rhythm and circulation of time itself. He would need to teach Nickel Hawk how to escape through this aperture, how to recognise originality. He would teach her that by submitting herself to the command of the work, she could collect other people’s memories and free her own vision. She had already created. She should teach her son about painting.
Look at him lifting his feet as though he were cycling, careful of the dog shit. Or maybe he was pedalling a foot-driven watermill from which the Chinese word for bicycle is derived. Going through the repetitious motions of life to sample all the scales of emotion. He rolled out his tricycle. It was garnished with rust, suffocated with cobwebs. He walked it through the streets, struggled with it up the hill to the school. He would ask for his old job back. He was a teacher. The measure of his life was as a pedagogue, a reproducer of failure. Cobwebs had been stuffed down his throat. He stood outside the gates. Heard the muffled recitals of verse. He wasn’t dressed. Barefoot, dirty, he would have to dust off his jacket. Mournfully, he wheeled the tricycle around. Sat on it and sped down the hill. The contraption squealed. Words running like spiders in his brain. He flew. The brakes gave way, levers like sponge cake beneath his fingers. At the bottom of the hill he had a moment of rational calculation: the seawall; if he turned at the right moment, he could spin the vehicle in such a way the back wheels would take the brunt of the impact. But there was no balance. There was no weight. It rolled and he toppled; surprised, disoriented, uncharted; and then there were perfumes, flowers, sweet paradise.
His dogs were sleeping faithfully on his cold body when the women found him in his dry tub – you should have seen their look of horror, the realisation that their welfare had suddenly disappeared – and there he was, divested finally of the fugues he so favoured, having come to rest when he thought his work was finally and uselessly done. Passing on. There was a smile on his ravaged mouth, a glow on his cheeks where a savage beauty had settled.
30
And now I await something which may not make itself apparent. I, Walter Gottlieb, am waiting for a life sentence…the interminable future of one’s reputation. Had I not interrogated Redvers, absorbed his memory, found out all I could in order to glimpse the palimpsest of Conceição? Had Redvers knowingly lied and I blindly followed, or had he lied blindly and I followed knowingly? Have I not mined Conceição’s archive to discourage future fabulators? Am I not wearing a red bow tie? A clean white shirt? Please be assured I have staked my life on my credibility and my research. Conceição has been my life’s obsession. His descendants, save for one, are dead or untraceable. How else but to lure the survivor into my confidence? We fell out of course, in one-way traffic. He fled to Paris, his safe haven.
I have this little phial of morphine I stole from my doctor’s fridge. I do not know what it will do to the heart. Some kind of étouffement. Suffocation; constriction. Miraculous calm there is, in deceit: liminal, between two realms. What? Erect at a time like this? Alert, this organ? No, not my heart. A change of heart. That’s what all these drugs do; they turn life into a drowsy variation of thirty short dances between depression and excitement. So brief. No rush now. Coming into a transit zone: counterpoint…step and turn…pulsing…flesh…inert matter… step…an anamorphosis…pirouette…my bleached face melting beside the toilet bowl, finally, those useless muscles in the process of articulation. Just a little bit more then. Dr Walter will write you from the future. I am at the jetty again, chained, waiting for the tide, only this time nobody will hear me. I am at the border. It is all too familiar, my ennui. No one writes to me.
I shall go to Lisbon, thence to Macau to meet Conceição, to sit and converse with his ghost, find out the truth. But before that I memorise my room on the upper storey, the rug, the desk; I mentally photograph these tessellated tiles, this cast-iron, clawfoot tub, the baroque mirror on the ceiling, so that I can accurately describe to others in another world how these crossings are accomplished by raiding the past. I turn on the taps. Here, in my absence, those who remain behind will feel they had forgotten something; a briefcase perhaps. Downstairs, they will be reminded by a small leak in the ceiling. Readers will experience a certain familiarity with things out of time, having encountered an invisible stranger from the future who, like themselves, is a perennial lover of life. To learn this new identity, to be open to a world brimful with hope and happiness, is like learning how to ride a bicycle, moving forward while sitting still, pedalling faster to avoid falling, conquering borderless territories by means of a sweet union with the earth.