The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  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.