by Brian Castro
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 pas
s. 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?
7
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.
