The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  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.

  18

  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.

  19

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.