by Brian Castro
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 wa
s 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 h
ear 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.
