The Bath Fugues
Page 16
Fondest love. Anna.
Forever Sunday
Forever Sunday,
Christianity has given us Sunday nothingness.
We wait for work in the dreadful melancholy of tomorrow.
We find there is some virtue in the idea of work, though we hate the idea of it, not work, but the cliché of virtue.
On Sundays we Portuguese sit empty in our rooms reading the newspaper, wanting to be saved by writing.
In this gentlemen’s guesthouse in Macau, at 40 patacas a month, we have a bed, laundry service and passable meals.
We have wine, although it costs a little more than in Portugal.
On Sundays we play waltzes on the old harpsichord in the hall, trying to drive away our hearts, which keep turning towards Lusitania, in a westerly direction, across the sea.
We are men, are we not, with feelings?
On Sunday evenings we play with the two little baby tigers the owner, Hing Kee, has received as payment from an adventurous tenant. They scratch and bite and their pupils dilate and contract, like my blood pressure in the season of typhoons.
Sometimes we walk up the hill to the grand hotel, the Boa Vista, with views of Bishop’s Bay, always conscious of Sunday, always aware of the emptiness of the streets, longing for a bath in a clay and enamel Chinese tub into which an attendant has poured fresh hot water, wherein we linger, keeping Sunday to ourselves, keeping our leisure running and our neurosis close.
For we are civil servants.
Some of us, the conscientious ones, prepare Monday’s work in the drawing room, where there is a large billiard table they use for a desk, where they spread out their plans and graphs and ostentatiously place a pencil behind their ears, making the rest of us uncomfortable, for already we have forgotten the time of progress, that infernal train we feel is driving us into slavery, and we can only read the time as Sunday, in the eyes of the tiger who yawns with a red mouth, a furnace, its stomach ignorant of schedules.
10
A young girl was kidnapped on the corner of the rua de Roma. The Procurador’s secret police captured the culprit. There he is in a bamboo cage. His arms and hands are bound with rattan. Around his neck, a leather strap. This can be wetted down, not to cool him, but to strangle him when it dries. Then it can be soaked again. He is lucky, the Procurador says to the assembled crowd. Under Chinese jurisdiction, outside the enclave, he would already have had his side pierced with a knife, so the organs are revealed one by one. A lesson in anatomy. Then his arms and legs would be cut off with a chopper. This would be done amongst the crowd, so people would have a close-up view, to participate in the carnage out of a fascination with the spectacle, with what is normally forbidden; the awe of the law.
The presiding judge was Camilo Conceição.
Portuguese law condemns slavery and execution, he begins. But he knows this is not about slavery, execution or Portuguese law, but about the customs of the Chinese. This was the ironic twist of Christianity: You could not apply Portuguese family law to heathens. It was liberalism by default. But Judge Conceição is of the old school. He believes one should be equal before the law. In opposition to the views of the Procurador, Judge Conceição declares that defendants cannot have it both ways. One law for all.
The judge looks at the plaintiff. She is attractive, in a hardfaced way. There is never a smile. But then again, this is not a smiling matter. She has plaited her hair up on her head, in an attempt to look more mature, perhaps. She cannot be more than twenty-four years of age. That means she would have had her own child at the age of twelve.
The prosecutor begins his speech. Kidnapping and slavery are serious matters. But Judge Conceição is not listening. The defendant has already stated he bought the girl. Yes, slavers are sending people abroad from Macau, but in Macau itself, there is no slavery per se. The Chinese buy and sell everything, including children. To prosecute every case, they would have to prosecute virtually every family in Macau. Minors are sold for adoption and domestic service. But it is not about a price. It is about a gratuity. Like a marriage dowry. No price is set, but it is about compensating the parents for the loss of their child.
All this is rattling through Judge Conceição’s mind. He sees very clearly that the kidnapper had not paid enough. It was purely a money matter. His mind drifts to Paris. He sees Baudelaire and the black prostitute Jeanne Duval. Baudelaire understood prostitution: the wage labour of his mistress; the prostitution of his art. Judge Conceição looked at the young girl, the mother’s child. The child was extremely pretty. The child was smiling at him. She leant her head against her mother’s breast. Madonna and child. Sphinx and angel, both almondeyed and brazen. Conceição ponders over the fact that children are the oldest form of commodity in the oldest civilisation. Nothing was more of a mass article than progeny. Devoid of sex, desire was essentially the voluptuousness of buying and selling, of coinage. Just as Judge Conceição took pleasure in having to rewrite the law.
The judge takes a drink from his water flask. It stands next to a clay pot, which is ochre in colour and decorated by a red and white motif: an old white-bearded man sits on a mountaintop meditating, his head in the clouds. A goddess on a distant mountain acts as a counterpoint, a siren depicted on the same scale, distracting him from philosophy. Chinese painters were never interested in physical scale. Like a Bach fugue, the mountains are piled, one on top of another, as if this multiplicity made them immeasurable and contradictory. It was conceptual art. Conceição had bought this clay pot at the markets behind his guesthouse. They could have given it to him because it leaked. There seemed to be a small hole at the bottom. Maybe it was meant to be filled with soil, for a plant. But no, the barrowman wanted a quarter of a pataca for it. He called it a clepsydra. The judge called it a bargain. The pleasure of the squeeze.
The prosecutor was droning on. Judge Conceição sweated just listening to his tumid style. The prosecutor waxed lyrical, drew out a white handkerchief, mopped his brow, his puffy white sleeves fluttering over his face. Conceição could never have prosecuted. He never believed enough in pure evil. He could never see the devil rising from hell in counterpoint to God’s descent. No, good and evil were equidistant, like the northern Sung design on his clay pot, and all was adjudged by compass and square, not by the trickery of perspective. Each a function of the other. The prosecutor was using a well-known currency: aware that Chinese families purchased members in return for certain rights over them…filial duties, concubinage etc., it would be better to pursue the lesser charge of kidnapping in order to secure a conviction, rather than take the hypocritical European stance on child slavery. The latter was an emotional issue, and the Chinese did not deal with emotions as something to be exalted. Emotions had no social relevance. One’s behaviour, one’s selfreliance, were far more important than self-expression of this kind. But the prosecutor was taking a long time about it. People in the courtroom were fanning themselves, falling asleep. They were already bored with this celebrated case.
In order to bring his mind back to the current situation, Judge Conceição made an unprecedented announcement. He cut short the prosecutor’s closing speech by pointing to the clay pot on his desk. The water has all leaked away. Your time has gone.
Counterfeit
You could call me the counterfeit judge, but cutting time short brought value to judgment, worth to coin.
I had no real calling for it, to pronounce verdicts as though one had made a discovery of guilt when there was no such thing.
The law, any law when translated, is counterfeit. It is about the two sides of our nature; the two sides of our word which we give and then take back.
It is not about writing poetry on a Sunday afternoon, inspired by Baudelaire’s clock.
I suffer, therefore, from something that is non-existent; the sliced conscience of the advocado.
But I am irritated by Chinese indifference to their own suffering.
I am a double-man and the abyss is widening.
This is what I call the counterfeit coin of Colonial Law. One can pass it off quickly, like water in a leaky pot; or one can pass it on slowly, where I’m sure the drip of water from a clay pot will be used as a vessel of torture and eventually, execution.
The courtroom is stuffy and the crowd is only half-satisfied. They flutter their straw fans at their breasts and talk loudly. No blood today. When then?
11
Camilo Conceição was a collector. He was an obsessive shopper. He went on sprees in the markets of old Macau. Old junk; brocantes; pots and pipes. It was raining of course. It always rained when he went to the markets. He bought a clepsydra and listened to it clinking and sloshing with ancient sounds: kleptein, to steal; hydo-r, water. It had gearwheels and a floating dart carried by a cherub, pointing out the hour on a drum marked with lines. Water was syphoned off from a small aperture by a waterwheel. He set it up in his bathroom. He was so consumed by this purchase – he paid too much for it – that he fell into a kind of swoon. The object had taken on a value beyond itself, and within its aura he had become very small, shrunk to nothing, wishing to pass though a vanishing point. The eye of a needle sees much.
A few days later, Conceição was trying to adjust the time when his pocket watch slipped from his hands and fell to the floor, shattering the glass over its dial. He looked for a repairer and found one on the second floor of a dilapidated house and there behind a counter sat a girl with very nimble fingers, whose sole job was to fix watches. As he looked on, she removed the shards from the dial and screwed on a new glass. Her enslavement to this task in this dark room, her devotion to this object which normally sat intimately in his trouser pocket, her presence as an industrial slave whom he had purchased for a few minutes, produced a dilation of his desire. Watching her fingers, he grew intimate with her in the small space of her infinity.
He’s not sure what to make of these feelings of contraction and expansion. He can only relate them to his heart, which is not in good shape and which pumps erratically, shrinking and dilating so violently it feels constricted by coils of water serpents. His body tries to escape from itself through a small hole in time. The girl charges too much, but he pays. He is happy enough to be used; if only he could do something to rescue an unknown talent from her abjection.
Chromatic Insanity
Several months now, I have been sinking into this place; the oily glare grounds my canvas; sheen of white light over the muddy pane of the delta; lazy rattan blinds sway over old balconies where my haemic respiration keeps sex at bay, so far from sleep, so close to death the latter has become familiar; bones crack in the cemetery, where ancient explorers, used to the thunderclaps of storm and cannon, moulder beneath stones unkempt and forgotten; temple dogs stray over them, rabid, cowering and dangerous; in the shops across the street foetuses doze in glass jars; I stand before them, deciding between snake-wine and powdered tiger-testicles, strolling from chamber to chamber in the cool darkness which smells of worn wood and dried herbs and I am absorbing a humid illness, which will turn me into dusty matter, drive me into my own portrait, a small disappearance into indifferent monochrome, that of a man without consequence, whose heart, meatless, has stopped hungering for Europe.
My bowels are bad; I hire a vehicle; a tricycle, a contraption ridden by a man pedalling in front, his ribs rippling beneath a yellow skin tanned by sun and anaemic from opium, his chest rattling wet bellows; I buy a small tin bathtub to place in my rooms, away from the noisy operatics of the other civil servants; I wash often to keep clean; my intestines ache and maybe there is something missing there, perhaps I am semi-colonic; threading our way now through the narrow streets I know by heart; Macau a small place; I do not need to travel any distance, but am reaching further and faster in this vehicle powered by a human narrowly harnessed to life; I negotiate a price with him; it is his livelihood; he doesn’t want to sell; I meet his boss, a Mr. Lok Yu, who can arrange for me to own one of these trishaws, but I would have to buy the license as well; we come to an arrangement; I could pay it off on instalment, but I would not be allowed to carry any passengers; I agree; the trishaw keeps me above the crowd, allowing me to fly past without brushing against them while remaining very much in their midst, smelling them, hearing them; I am in graceful motion, I tip slightly, but am still in place; a rider of a black iron tricycle with an iron bar in front and a cushioned bench and a fold-down canopy. Every morning a new desperation; I have the luxury of melancholy, accursed for having been a judge; and because of my laughable body which only wants to sneak through a tiny aperture in the world to escape the small fate of a fat-arsed judge, because I lament the useless speed and the deadly mass and the deafening hysteria that Western industrial time will become, where I will not be able to dream for the acceleration of colours, where I will not hear the echo of my awareness of the world for the hubbub of the maddened crowd, where I will not breathe the air of freedom because of its small-mindedness, I shall give it up; judging, that is; and attend to the eye of the needle and all that; consider it accomplished, this exile. I bought several long indigo gowns, the kind Chinese men wear.
Each morning I ride the small triangular route of five miles between the Leal Senado, the Border Gate and the Boa Vista Hotel. In this daily round I am able to gauge the vital rhythms of the heart which work against the brain.
The kidnapping case has been a watershed. It has divided me. I will no longer represent the King, Catholicism or Portugal. I have taken a job as a schoolmaster. It is a step downwards. Sometimes in the rain I see myself and my children absorbed into China, plying this route on their trishaws in sodden blue pyjamas. Everything goes downward. Blue anyway.
I have come to an arrangement with the mother and child. I have paid money to release them from their employer, along with the understanding that they will live with me, the woman as my concubine, her daughter as my mooi jai, or bondservant. Silver Eagle and Nickel Hawk. Birds of prey. There is no problem here with the counterfeit of marriage. I paid 1000 patacas to the mother’s pimp, freeing her from prostitution and rescuing her daughter from the same trade. I enclosed 500 patacas in a red and gold lucky envelope and gave it to the mother as a goodwill gesture that I will look after her daughter. Oh, and I have moved to a two-storey house on the Praia Grande, right on the embankment, so that the glare of the rippling water is projected on my embossed metal ceiling when I doze on Sunday afternoons, my heart pounding with exhaustion from all that vigorous coupling.
After that I play the piano. A passacaglia. I am dancing with pretty women in the street. One is not carried away completely, as in a fugue. Dreaming of Coímbra. My deep melody is not what sentimentalists call romantic love, though that is something for which I have never stopped yearning. Unfortunately, Nickel Hawk’s growing beauty only shows up the ugliness of my playing. I stop.
12
The letters to and from Australia keep cropping up in the Conceição archive in the vaults of the National Museum on the rua São Paulo in Macau. Now that we know he was a collector, it isn’t so much of a mystery. He obviously bought the letters from those junk shops you find in the East, down an alley, the doorway covered by a curtain, where it was always dark inside, so you can’t inspect very carefully all the copies and forgeries, calligraphy by Genghis Khan, for God’s sake. On the counters you can find boxes of photographs, letters, stamps, incense, pens and brushes. But these letters he has kept don’t seem so valuable. One can conclude from them that the two women correspondents were artists, one a potter and sculptor and the other an oil painter. Conceição was of course very interested in collecting art. The Chin
ese collection that was sent to the Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris contained some gems.
Conceição’s poems seem to be minor things, little impressions, tiny watercolours he recorded about Macau, no doubt inspired now by his new domestic circumstances, preparing his lessons for the boys school, his Portuguese classes filled with desultory students, sons of diplomats and civil servants, privileged offspring of wealthy Chinese merchants eager for a European connection. And Conceição? What about him? He doesn’t like his job. He moons at the classroom window, unfolding his dreams over Bishop’s Bay. Each morning a new desperation. His pupils have no revolutionary spirit. Don’t they see that the King’s days are numbered? That Portugal will no longer be the colonial power that it once was? That it is management of the colonies that is sending it broke? Young poets were committing suicide: Mário de Sá Carneiro; his good friend Antero de Quental; all impotent romantics and rhetorical republicans. It was good that he had left Portugal. At least his was a slow suicide.
As a dozy Chinaman smokes his long pipe,
as a cured fish gazes blindly
into the fumy night,
flanks skewered with chopsticks,
Portugal lies in its fix
sleeping unclothed,
sunk in dreams, feverish.
A cold wind rushes through
the colonial arcades
and another red-haired Autumn flees.
13
Darling Grace,
…the excitement of such love generates the same heat as most other passions, but the difference is danger. Conventional love confronts you with another being, a man, entirely different from you, with his smells and his harsh and hairy body and his belligerent mind. It is his job to hunt, not to linger over passion. In our kind of love however, you too often discover yourself as a lack – because a mirror of your own weaknesses is constantly displayed; a doubling of sameness (not a tautology!), and a multiplication of self-hatred. Companionship teeters precariously on the edge of this narcissism. This is the danger: an obsessive dependency turned into a thick cobweb of feeling too intricate to unpick on a daily basis. Sometimes it is a numbness. Sometimes you wish to be swallowed up by the other. My deep, deep love is for you, my dearest.