by Brian Castro
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?
