The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  * The Portuguese edition, loosely translated as Walter’s Briefs, had to be recalled because of printing errors. (Ed.)

  Walter’s Brief

  Baudelaire wrote no detective story because, given the structure of his instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the detective. In him, the calculating, constructive element was on the side of the asocial and had become an integral part of cruelty.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  Sunday

  Coímbra, Portugal.

  The slow drip of a Sunday complaint on the fourteenth day of January 1894 fell drop by drop with faint determination from the roof to my numbered door. Rosaries of rain running into braids of guttered music; downpipes of depression, smells of fungus. More:

  Tomorrow I will leave my father’s house lugging two small suitcases into the tumid tram smelling of horse, eyes cast down to run the obstacle course of half-digested oats, while up above, dark faces at the greasy glass will grin at my discomfort. The air is thick with garlic and ripe overcoats. I garner no empathy. I’m from a line with an ancient deformity. Just five feet high and hydrocephalic. Family lore has it that we will always be granted one concession to beauty, unfortunately always illegitimate… that’s the fee.

  The Conceição Concession hasn’t fallen upon me.

  Leaving home finally. I did not want my mother there. Her position was not one that was justified by marriage, instead she would have been out of place in her condition, amongst my father’s friends and colleagues who were milling about the carriage. They sent me off in style, gave me money to continue my studies; even as a junior magistrate I did my father proud and he held me saying, ‘Sonny come back soon’. Then there was Hannah, my good friend’s sister, letting herself be kissed for the first time on the mouth, my heart all aflutter, her hard lips when she whispered I would be missed. Suddenly my mother appeared in her shabby dress crying aloud, her face a mess of tears and mud from the potatoes she had been peeling. My father had already turned away and disappeared into the crowd which pretended not to see what I had always feared – her imploring hands, her trembling prayer reeling between novenas. I placed some money in her hands, their backs still covered in farina, and saw her frown, and I ran for the horsedrawn tram, away from town, still hearing her exclamation: I bore him from my loins, and now he gives me coins. I am not proud of being amongst bad seeds which have sprung unplanned in life’s dark row, but I shall not go down on hypocritical knees when my father has been my foe.

  I sit in the carriage like a mouse with cheese and watch schoolgirls on my corner wave goodbye to me, giggling at the lawyer’s son they knew was a bastard without beauty. The next century will be lit beneath a darkling sky and young brides who fasted for their wedding day will play their games reciting my verses (those which lasted), rung by rung, performed with a mocking bow: Camilo Conceição – a poet by any other name would sound as bad when sung with rhymes conceived in shame. Didn’t you know his father had laid a coloured parlourmaid?

  1

  He was making for Paris, his face covered in soot – he kept sticking his head out of the train window on the way to marvel at the countryside. He had not seen such vast and open fields, endless rivers and hunched artists examining their easels in seas of lavender. His father’s house in Coímbra looked out on rainy hills of habitation so the eye fell short, upon suits, umbrellas, a tight-laced bourgeoisie all smelling of wet newspaper. Nor did he like their town house in Lisbon, for there he could hear worms creeping in the night in his father’s books. The laws of torts and taxation succumbed to their appetite.

  In Paris the population glided on fumes: of alcohol, dead flowers and opium which he had smelt only once, when the dentist took out a tooth of his and later he had negotiated the streets in a swoon. He could never really sleep. It was just a lingering. Close to corruption. He wanted to dislocate himself in a way that brought a deeper past, completely to transform himself into another, and was convinced this other lay buried in China. Just the mere mention of a place name and he was compelled to travel there: Marseilles, Morocco, Manchuria. He would work at all kinds of jobs. He would become frenzied, unstoppable. China. It was whence all flowers came. He could smell its poetry.

  The fragment of the Portuguese self he carried within him was embalmed in dead law-books. It did not rise to the living world because it had no great tradition, only small-minded precedence. He was convinced his sleeplessness was a sign of something else awakening, something from a bottomless sea, an ancient vessel surfacing, upon which he would wander the world to find all the grand connections. Camilo Conceição: poet. The soughing of waves; the sloughing of sails. Stow it. Others would say such windy passions could only have been conceived by a defective mother suffering from hysteria. The tides, the moon. Conceição soon bore his father’s symptoms: popping eyeballs, a restricted field of vision. He felt no pain in parts of his body…he could stick needles into his tongue…but his nether regions were hypersensitive and disruptive, calmed only by warm baths, one brush upon that fleecy place and Vesuvius erupted. He was untouched so far by women or philosophers on their daily path. He felt; he touched; if only.

  Church

  From an early age – I think I was six or seven – I cursed the Infinite for allowing me into the world. Not God, for he was a white-beard resting in heaven, in a storm-tossed cloud steadied by archangels, old man, cape furled, not at peace, ranting at the wingèd youth who sheathed bright swords upon the words of maidens. I cursed Time for bringing me this moment, in which I was cast out from heaven’s beauty. Look, I am a centaur. My short hairy legs will carry me far.

  The Renaissance ceilings in the cathedral of my childhood in Coímbra. I mistook them for legitimacy, authority, the inheritance of deep feelings; believed such art demonstrated my crime of being born outside the law. The world was full of exquisite cherubs. My countless faintings at High Mass were proof not of low blood sugar but of a flaw, something interlinear – an impure strain which anarchists bore, their thirst to scatter incense and explosives; I fainted before fanaticism, which opened its thighs to receive me – intensely, purely, obscenely. At Mass I cursed.

  Unsurprising therefore I read Virgil, he who lived between two ages and doubted poetry’s false scheme to line up beauty and reality. I was on a different search, not for rhyme but for the reason why the Renaissance thought a discovery of perspective gave it a superior view. I preferred Chinese art. I saw their porcelain vases in a local museum. They were fragile picturepalaces and distance was neither here nor there, a discovery given only to the few.

  2

  His mother’s name was Pereira. It meant pear tree. Stable enough. Humble roots. She became his governess as they moved from town to town and as his father grew in importance, little Camilo began wearing boots. He did not find out she was his mother until he was ready to leave home. She told him she always wanted to be married under a pear tree. Not realising she was his mother, he did not see anything strange in this wish. Her moment to be free.

  Here he is: an indifferent pupil. A C-grade student. A short teenager walking with a stoop, the world too heavy for his four feet and ten inches. In Coímbra, a rainy old city, he attends university, writes sad poems about dawns and twilights and shows the first signs of clinical depression. Life, he writes to his friend Alberto Osório de Castro, was simply a matter of getting through time. He alternates between the past and the future and develops a fear of the present tense, which he associates with a miasma suppurating above the water pump in the square at night: a fog; now-time: time to go; those moments that have already embalmed their nostalgia. The sickness of his sadness.

  Conservative and rebellious, seething between self-importance and low self-esteem, he betrays no other talent than that of following his father, a judge. He enters law school in Coímbra but is not gifted enough in that direction. He will not attain that indifferent dream of his to argue in the high court, to expound matters of state waving a large white handkerchief sprinkled with eau d�
�Issy to an audience of visiting jurors. His ideas of republicanism are cloudy with naïve romance. As a probationary notary in Óbidos, he is suspended between births, marriages and deaths. No entry of a birth, marriage or death is without a raft of stories; that is, without deception. By deception he also means disappointment: love is not a real emotion; issue is quite without the balance of the law. Something going seriously wrong inside his head. Once a week he takes a walk to the baths at Buçaco, where there are green hills and gardens and there he pays for a rub-down by a hoary attendant. Payment is his requital.

  When he moves to the district court, he does not wish to call himself an advocate, avocado, that strange green Inca fruit known also as alligator pear, reminding him of his governess which he would never call Mother, even when she lay dying after the doctors extracted a weighty stone from her gall bladder. He is not interested in advocacy, but in provocation. Something growing inside him, a poisonous seed.

  In the newspaper room of the Club de Recreio he reads about the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta, whose manifesto declared that the insurrectionary deed is the most efficacious means of propaganda. He is secretly thrilled that this mindless advocacy of violence has made its way into the clubroom. He points out the headlines to his colleagues. Horrors have an enchanting effect on him. It is not yet cocktail hour, but most of the clubmen are already drunk. They snort at the news. The eponymous Malatesta is not sick in the head. He is a product of rag-pickers and that is why he has the capacity to act, Conceição says. The others are bewildered. Such rapacity. They will consider banning Camilo from the club. Before the new century gets into stride, anarchists will have assassinated President Sadi Carnot of France, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy and President McKinley of the USA, Conceição prophesies.

  He brought suspicion upon himself. An ironic grin appeared beneath his black beard; little white teeth; canary eggs. He probably belonged to the Carbonária. He was a republican; secretive. His hand gestures, when he illustrated his views, were coded signals. Perhaps the clubmen should have had this Conceição investigated. In any case, he was reading a poem by a Charles Baudelaire. Now that was someone worth prosecuting, they concurred; a communard, no doubt. Conceição swallowed his cognac and lit his cigar. In times of terror everybody is a detective, he said. He neglected to finish saying what he was thinking: that a poet, in times of terror, was first and foremost a whore, writing anything that provoked requital.

  Pancreatic Paris

  Desperation. Finding lodgings.

  I will pay, I can tell, for having treated my boring but comfortable life with such contempt.

  I drink too much in compensation.

  I did not want to hold up a deep mirror to the world, reflecting common perversities.

  I did not want to say: On a cold afternoon in the Hotel Californie, Miss Edith Wharton encountered Mr. Henry James on the carpeted landing.

  Or that something was terribly wrong. That there was a dog turd on the rug. Left there by the fireside spaniel. Nothing alarming; not as if there were no fish left in the sea.

  I had a deep hatred of novels, those embellishments of the bourgeoisie. Little commodities they took home in order to fry a frisson from an insecure world.

  I had borrowed some of my father’s money…about half of what he held in a strongbox behind his books. He was back from work, wet with rain, and he reached in and notes were falling like washed lettuce leaves from his hand and he gave me his blessing. My friend Alberto Osório de Castro loaned me the rest. At the Freemasons meeting we secretly said goodbye. Touching.

  There was a frozen dog turd on the carpeted landing.

  I was in Paris and the first call I made, after a couple of glasses of wine, was to one of Baudelaire’s dirty haunts – he changed addresses 27 times in one year – then I rented a room on the Île Saint-Louis near the Hôtel Pimodan to study what Baudelaire would have done behind the frosted glass in a chamber of that club with hardly any furniture, just couches upon which he participated in ‘fantasias’.

  Baudelaire wrote with a red goose quill. Hardly anything else on the table if there was a table. When the bailiffs took his bed he wrote on his lap, sitting on a chair made by his stepfather, with most of the stuffing gone, the material threadbare. His stomach groaned. Outside, all Paris was a digestif. It flowed with absinthe. In combat with his circumstances, he was tormented most by his clock. One o’clock: there will be no lunch. Six o’clock: no dinner. He lay comatose most of the time on the floor in order to conserve his energy for writing. He unscrewed the glass from the clock, ripped off the hands. Then he wrote on its face: It is later than you think. He wanted to travel to China. Hashish: his invitation to voyage.

  My neighbour’s cat slinks into my room. I remember something I wrote a year before when I haunted the museum in Coímbra…how the Chinese can tell the time from a cat’s eyes. I pick up the cat, stare into its pupils. Light reveals horror and night yields secrets. It is still before midday. In the present. Claws. What would the Chinese have done now? With this perpetual midday which never arrives? Sharp as a scar? A memory: I may have been Chinese; a grey Taoist day, on a beach somewhere near Figuiera da Foz; staring at a woman baring her breasts; her accusation; my smallness.

  3

  At the age of twenty-one, Camilo Conceição had not had any love affairs. Of course there were those little flutters of the heart, the flirtations which flattered him when all the girls were just taking on a dare, testing their resistance to revulsion against his ugliness. Always second-guessing. He had these big soft dark eyes with the lashes of an angel. There were further cruelties, but he took them as normal in the course of becoming a man, so he thought. One wistful, freckly nymphet allowed him to touch her nipples, little cherries which were no different from a boy’s. At school, boys did the ‘nipple-squeeze’ to each other as a form of ambush. He wasn’t sure if he should. Then there was Fernanda, who allowed him to court her when he came home from the university. It was like having a plump companion for whom you had to make allowances. He believed he lost his selfpity during this period, not his virginity.

  And finally there was the prostitute Delicia, who hated kissing, and after the first embrace during which he was premature, still fully dressed, he could not wait to save up enough for her and thought he would marry her and rescue her from such a life, teach her how to osculate, and it was only when he walked in on her with another man, a bald and tattooed worker undoing his undershorts while she lathered his muscled thighs with salivary smackers, that he decided he would not entertain romanticism ever again.

  In the streets they were staring at him. In the church they saw the black patch of sin pinned above his heart. Sooner or later punishment would come. A failure at his law exams. No reply to an acrostic poem he sent Matilda, the beautiful secretary belonging to his father’s colleague; deceitful Matilda who teased him by telling him that if only he would wait, he may have a chance…not today, not tomorrow, but soon…only to hear his father whispering to her one evening that his son was probably an invert.

  His ears continued to grow; not the appendages of a bourgeois, more like a peasant’s. He did not know how he got such lugs. Maybe they were pencil-rests. He should have grown his hair long; collected paintings.

  Sunday, Again

  Emptiest day of the Lord.

  Latecomer. Following the trail of Charles Baudelaire. Tail him like a ratcatcher in my grey greatcoat. He had to kill too; precursors like Lamartine, Musset, Hugo. Kill nature as they represented it. Portray Paris awash with grief and joy. He was intent on murder. Demolitions of buildings. Boulevards widened with dynamite. An underground rail network. A dull booming on the hour. They even blew up the cemeteries to make openings into the Underworld right next to department stores that opened their doors to a heaven awash with light. You hurry past at night. By day the white ray of progress plays tricks. You smoke a sticky jelly in your pipe. Achieve trompe-
l’oeil effects. Buildings veering from side to side. Clocks melting. On Haussmann’s new avenues they drape tarpaulins so all will be revealed on the opening day; shrouded graves for resurrection. In the sky, clouds are simmering. Soulful recollections of a grander past. He hated such above-ground landscapes, preferring the smells of coffee, fish and urine. Then the sulphurous rain.

  When I first read Baudelaire I said to myself I was finished with poetry. Now I was reading him again, standing at one end of the Pont Neuf waiting for my eyeglasses from an optician on the Quai Mégisserie wondering about the book I had intended to write in Coímbra on town planning in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, looking up from reading Les Fleurs du mal, I saw his double. Yes, unmistakably Baudelaire, with that tic in his walk as though he was fencing with an unseen foe, the dark scowl, the coal-black eyes which burned into me. He raised a forefinger and then looked away, saying: You are buggered by your leisure time, just like the rest of them!

  I took that as a warning. The world was in production – arcades and emporia filled with pinstriped suits and spats, and I was searching for a cat which could be my timepiece, cornering Baudelaire for me finally and for all time. That cat had seen the devil.

  4

  The world was crude. You could say that from the moment Camilo Conceição was born, the world was already too abrasive. Being tossed out onto a towel like that. His skin too sensitive. A shade too dark for the ruling class, yet he sunburned easily when his father took him to the beach at Porto. His governess, Miranda Pereira, rubbed oil into his back and he howled with pain. Oil rubs out the darkness, she said. When he grew older he was forever running from crowds. Something about their darkness. Men on street corners reading newspapers; who stuck out their legs when he passed. It was the way you treated a dog, a charmless runt who could do no better than stack boxes at the fish markets. His father said crowds were like that: the crowd mentality was the mentality of the country. But how to whiten his skin?