THE HOUSE-FOR-DEATH

Bachelard, in one of his texts, refers to the house as being fundamental to an understanding of the external sedimentation of layers of intimacy, a description which is regarded as highly polemical because it endows the poetic image with a creative power which biographies either ignore or conceal. 1In fact, the house is simply another journey towards a time both spiritual and physical in the search for a truer reflection of the individual: Pessanha, punetio-iane-mean (living corpse), in the abstracted consideration of the Chinese. Over the decades he lived in the Far East, Pessanha devoted himself to death in a location par excellence for the solitary weaving of his "cadaver's shroud".2

The house reflects habits and character, but there is always a superficial arrangement into a kind of mask. There can be no doubt that the house reflects the intimate nature of the individual although it inevitably contains an element of artifice. As a private space created for privacy, the house is tainted by social and cultural values which more often than not take precedence over the generalised poverty of private worlds. We must be sensitive in interpreting where the private world of the individual begins and where his private dreams end, even though these are constructed on the basis of the outside world. Visibly ostentatious houses end up losing all the features of intimacy which are encapsulated, in the opposite extreme, by the hermit's retreat. Baudelaire states that in a palace "il n'y a pas un coin pour l'intimité" whereas the hermit's retreat represents "total refuge".3

The house may then be interpreted as a corpus of images. There are those who readily compare it to a live being with its own organs, rhythms and breath. 4 Inevitably it is a corpus whose behaviour depends on the personality of its inhabitant emphasising tendencies because, in a certain sense, he is surrounded by mirrors. The house, seen as a kind of double ego, remits its forms and contents which certainly offer security because they have been filtered by its own image.

The feelings which we can develop with regard to a house and its components are both varied and extraordinary. In the initial stages, these feelings are positive and stay with us throughout life in the form of the necessary means to our survival. 5 Later on, they become cursed objects, dangerous tools when life in that same space is filled with sorrow and unhappy memories. *

There is, however, a further possibility, a possible way out of the second hypothesis. The third scenario is that of difference, the exotic, in other words the slow, systematic extinction of the past, the worship of barbarian gods and foreign aesthetics. In all truthfulness, this implies rejecting all familiar objects "to hand"6 and recommencing, rebuilding with a new set of paraphernalia to which touch and sight become accustomed as the spirit extinguishes the cruelty overshadowing it. Leaving aside miserable ostentations, it is in this sense that it is worth talking of the mask: the home is a disguise, not for others but for ourselves and it is in this ritual house, brought back to life as a sacred space, that desires are exorcised. After all, it is said that the house is the perfect mediator. Given that it is a corpus of images, the elements of which it is composed lay the foundations for another universe between the body of the inhabitant and the outside. It is a universe which mediates in two senses: it is through its windows, the internal layout and the chances it offers for leaving that the child comes into contact with the world; secondly, it functions as a barrier preventing the world from entering the private universe of the individual.

THE ACCURSED HOUSE

To my classical spirit, that Romantic disorder was an affliction. 7

It is an unfortunate fact that in order to discuss Camilo Pessanha's home in Macau we have to turn to the scanty descriptions left by the odd friend or visitor. Today, interested parties are merely given vague clues as to a house described by more or less loyal friends. These are contradictory accounts of people whose sensibilities à I'air du temps overreacted to the poet's last home. Nothing remains of the house itself, sacrificed on the imperious altar of business. There are, however, occasional descriptions of those who had a chance to visit it and recorded their impressions on paper.

First of all, it is worth thinking about these accounts. Written by Europeans, their objectivity turns to surreptitious reactions and feelings in which discomfiture and surprise at the difference are patently obvious. In these descriptions, Pessanha's house ends up being judged in negative terms: it is cursed, it is an accursed house.

Whether this is expressly declared or read between the lines, the reaction is clear. The phrase quoted above from Sebastião da Costa is highly significant. In a certain way it is obvious that it was not to a classical spirit that "that Romantic disorder was an affliction". Rather it seemed so to a European sensibility confronted with an apparently chaotic organisation of space where some of the predominant features of this cultivation were not in fact apparent.

It was not so much the Romantic disorder which was disturbing, rather the fact that it was so foreign and perhaps appeared rather removed from reality. What immediately attracts our attention is the basic difference between Camilo Pessanha's house and the homes of the other Europeans in Macau's Christian quarter, particularly when we bear in mind the fact that the poet held the post of judge, advocate and teacher in the city. Pessanha's home was discomfiting for the Europeans because they were unable to find in it the indicators and details which served as reference points and gave them security.

It is interesting that his home was never simply described as a 'home' but rather as "a dark, secluded little house"8, "a huge old house"9, "an exotic, extravagant scenario"10. This was not merely an exercise in description so much as a recognition of the impossibility of applying the word 'home' with its highly specific connotations for Europeans. There are obvious contradictions which, nevertheless, we can attribute to the kindness of Alberto Osório de Castro who, unable to avoid feeling a pang of anguish at the poet's home, tried to take comfort in creating a complete fantasy which almost seems pathetic:"... I went in the morning to look for Camilo in his huge old house which was somewhat livened up by fifteen philosophical, leisurely relatives, all of them Chinese". This restfulness and philosophical activity, more appropriate to Socrates' home, stand in marked contrast to the impressions of A. de Albuquerque "an infernal chattering in Chinese mixed up with the barking of dogs".11 Alberto Osório de Castro, a friend and admirer of Pessanha, tried to convey a Romantic vision of the poet in a calm, contemplative China which entirely fails to converge with other descriptions of his home.

José de Carvalho e Rego's account is disbelieving, almost accusatory at the state of the poet's house. His description centres on his shock at the fact that Pessanha had received Governor Rodrigo Rodrigues and the Spanish writer Blasco Ibañez"... without anything having been changed in that excessive setting".

In general, if we overlook Osório de Castro's embellished, kindly account, the remaining descriptions are imbued with a sense of stupefaction, surprise, disgust and, finally, pity. It was something people found hard to accept, something terrible, something absurd, something unreal. What this different reality implied for appalled European onlookers was the gaping chasm, the almost total disaffection which separated Pessanha's private life from a Europe he wished to detach himself from-far-off in the mists of the past-from his privacy.

PROLIFERATION AND EMPTINESS

At the opposite extreme of spartan decoration we find the bazaar-house, a saturated universe where emptiness has no place. Here there is an unleashed proliferation of objects. No empty walls, no unoccupied spaces: everywhere there are carpets, pictures, vases, plates, statues, calligraphy scrolls and paintings. Usually these objects serve no practical purpose. However, they silently end up taking over the house as a group although none of the components acquires enough importance to be highlighted as occurs in the Spartan home. "I discovered, amongst the heaps of predominantly worthless items, a valuable Quang-hi plate which he told me he had lost many years previously"12. This was Camilo Pessanha's home, aptly described as a chaotic museum of Chinese art.

His was a disorganised house inhabited by doubly nomad objects for, apart from having no designated place, they had been cut off from their natural environment. This, however, was a Chinese house organised in a Chinese way, filled with Chinese objects and lived in by Chinese. One point immediately becomes apparent: other than his books, Pessanha had taken nothing of his former European homes with him. There are none of those familiar objects which give people security and shape their private space into an image of the past, those comforting little objects with can easily be identified and which, for the European, create the home. Quite the opposite, we are confronted with a magnificently disorganised proliferation of strange objects which even end up falling outside the grasp of their possessor.

It is not my intention to analyse Pessanha's motives as a collector, rather to put forward an alternative suggestion. In all truth, it appears as if he wished to distance himself from Europe and European customs. This desire to distance himself, however, was really a distancing from his own self in search of a peace which had been prevented by the malevolent universe which he bore with him so obsessively. This was the universe in which he could see all the ghosts and painful recollections of his past life. This makes sense as the house is always a resting place regardless of what it is like. Sometimes people move into houses and only later when they are installed do they slowly adapt them into homes. This was not the case with Pessanha, however: for him the home was essential due to his overriding need for rest and seclusion.

Valuable objects, Chinese drapes: the mental paths which these items traced led the poet on a spatiotemporal mental journey through an immense, fantastic China, a China filled with exoticism and steeped in ancient wisdom. These items do not, however, represent Pessanha's self-enforced exile from others and from himself in order to escape from the "pain which he needlessly deplores". What is the deep pain that the boundless genius invokes? Pessanha never managed to find a positive kind of peace: his escape from pain did not result in a creative tonic but rather a constant swamping in the funereal waters of death.

^^MADALENA'S HOUSE We shall now go back in time to Portugal, to Camilo's youth and look at contemporary accounts in order to uncover his relationship with his original house. António Quadros13 comments with regard to this that he was "horrified by his parents' house", an opinion which Pessanha himself expressed frankly in a letter to Alberto Osório de Castro in which he wrote "the abyss of misery and pain which my father's house was" or "the infamous old mansion on the Braga estate". It is common knowledge that Camilo never forgave his father for not having married his mother and thus making him bear the shameful mark of illegitimacy. Someone had entered the home of his mother, a virgin peasant girl, and "polluted" and "torn my linen sheets" with a "cruel, simian fury". Blatantly referring to his mother in this poem, Pessanha makes a highly negative allusion to his home: No longer shall you come back to the hearth. No longer shall you wander. Soul of my mother... No longer shall you walk in the snow, Begging nightly at the door of matrimony. This last line is amongst the most pungent in Portuguese poetry and draws a clear line between Pessanha's house and other houses which he thought to be family-oriented, real homes. "Begging nightly at the door of matrimony": a searing image of the soul of a defiled woman, prevented from having a normal family, catching glimpses in icy solitude and sadness of the family warmth denied her in the windows of strangers' homes. After all, "the ash had cooled on the brazier"! This is another indication of Camilo's unsatisfactory relationship with his home. The fire is the centre of the home, a crackling, everlasting fire tended by virginal priestesses. The fire is the ancestral source of heat, security and the most beautiful daydream: a snooze in front of the fire in the protective warmth of the family. Camilo's identification with his mother and her shame is excessive. It is taken onto various spiritual levels which are always imbued with a dreadful feeling of anguish, sin, a burning, suffocating sense of blame: O Madalena, ó cabelos de rastos|... Meu coração, velha moeda fútil,/ E sem relevo, os caracteres gastos,|... Quem também fosse, ó cabelos de rastos,/ Ensanguentado, enxovalhado, inútil,/... Morrer tranquilo, - o fastio da cama.../... Amargura, nudez de seios castos!.../... Sangrar, poluir-se, ir de rastos na lama,/ O Madalena, o cabelos de rastos! Yet again we have the image of a degenerate woman and, inevitably, the subtle shift from the biblical sinner to the picture of his violated mother: "the bareness of chaste breasts!... Bleeding". And the later identification with himself: "Blood-stained, soiled, useless". Pessanha had good enough reason for his less than happy memories of his father's house. After all, it never represented any true security for him: his childhood is described as a passage from one house to the next without coming to rest for, at times, very long periods. His father, forced to move from one place to the next, took his lover maid and children with him but was never able to give them any family stability. Ironically, Camilo was to repeat the same pattern later on... ^^THE CHRYSALIS Entomological treatises state that one of the most important features of the chrysalis is that it does not move. Apparently, immobility is one of the requirements for the journey into metamorphosis. Peace, rest and quiet and an aspiration for greater things are the states which lead to slow and unusual changes. The conditions required for metamorphosis in the natural world are, to a certain extent, reiterated in the Taoist tradition which calls for man's transformation in the Immortal Foetus. The larva leaves the world, using miraculously invisible threads to weave a protective covering around itself until it is completely enveloped, admirably protected and, in effect, prepared for the alchemy of metamorphosis. This is only a superficial rest, however: in the heart of the chrysalis, transformation is taking place. In fact, this unusual movement underneath an impassive cover has, since time immemorial, made the chrysalis a symbol of primitive wisdom. We find, in a suffering spirit such as Pessanha's, a forcible desire for metamorphosis. Basically, this is the inexplicable essence of pain which the individual uses to hold back the unfinished dreams of youth. In fact, the pain is much more internalised and inflicts an ardent desire for change. At its extreme, brought into perspective by an intimate rejection of the predominant moral values, it forces the individual into constant dialogue with death. Schopenhauer14 states that the pains of the world open the way for the intelligent man to search out refined pleasures such as "delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spiritual liquors". In his Macau home, the poet had a daily encounter with the "divine drug". There is little to be gained in looking to miserable descriptions or pious sentiments, false morality or a mediocre fear of degeneration. Camilo sheltered from the world but this does not mean he forgot it. Quite the opposite, he remained attentive yet cocooned against the pain, his spirit enveloped in the spiralling sweet smoke, far-removed from human ills beholding only the calm immenseness of his wisdom.

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury; and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges... Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! 15

This strikingly beautiful passage from De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater reflects exactly the intoxicating power opium, its ability to reorganise the world and limit the pain felt by humans. It is followed, truly enough, by a quick descent into the torments of opium, the dreams which, at their most/terrifying, end in claustrophobia, a sensation of being walled in which we can find in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. 16

This is the price which must be paid, not for escape into unawareness but for a different consciousness, freed from the limitations of human meanness, a multiple awareness of time and place, a place of protective light and shadow. This is how Pessanha finds "the panacea for all ills", perfectly in tune with his environment in Macau. Those who attribute the extended period of poetic inactivity (or at least the absence of any signs of output) to his opium addiction are in some ways right because, just like the chrysalis, his creativity was fermenting inside an inner heart.

Let us turn to De Quincey once again:

The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.

The opium smoke, the magnificent, sinister sensations, form another of the threads the poet winds around himself to attain a new ordering of the world, to increase the distance -- another of the threads creating the protective casing housing the metamorphosis in which his profound disbelief prevents him from believing. He is left only the final step, the voyage in the ship which never reaches "anywhere, ever...".

THE HOUSE-FOR-DEATH

Let us return to Macau, to the house where Camilo Pessanha lived with his Chinese maid and lover... without ever officially recognising the children borne of the relationship! What kind of house was it? A house strangely detached from all Western references, a house for exile, the final refuge of a deeply embittered man whose only pleasure was Chinese art and an addiction to opium.

It is not difficult to recognise it. His final address was, for Pessanha, his own tomb, a space for dying, the home of the living corpse who dragged himself through the streets of Macau. Surrounded by barbaric wealth, Camilo lived in his home like a pharaoh in his eternal tomb. The collection itself was no more than an inextricable labyrinth, an antechamber off his own bedroom, his death bed.

There is an obvious, obsessive image in his poetry of ossification, mineralisation, a final solution for torment and pain. Living clippings of sand, Take my body and open up its veins... Turn my blood,... Saline crystals, See the living plasma in the sand... Similarly, in another poem: For the best, in the end, Is neither to hear nor to see... For them to pass over me and to feel no pain!... And I on terra firma, compact, trodden, Terribly quiet. Laughing because nothing pains me. Death, the slow prospect of mineralisation, foreseen as the only solution, the final panacea for a pain which not even opium or poetry could relieve.

Despite appearances, this is an organised tomb: two antechambers, increasingly difficult to gain entry, and the bedroom also filled with chinoiserie. The first room, for visitors, was possibly the only relic of sociability or, alternatively, the bare social minimum for gossiping outsiders.

Had it not been for the large, glistening European metal bed and a few books shoved in a wardrobe and on the chairs, we could have been in the home of any local Chinese. 17 This is an interesting point for it confirms what has been said above with all the accompanying symbolism. An old rosary hung from the headboard which, tears in his eyes, the poet told me had belonged to his late mother and which he always had by him. 18

It is good to see: once the two antechambers have been crossed, within the innermost part of his refuge, the poet lying curled up in a foetal position preserves a possession of his mother which brings him to tears every time he speaks of it. All houses have other houses constructed within them leading to a truly private space. For Camilo Pessanha, the return to his mother was his encounter with death, his last chance of purification. In death's arms, in the arms of his mother, the material being wasted slowly away, changing to mineral in an absurd mimesis of the house shell surrounding him. Finally, distance is created with regard to life itself and its accompanying pain. It is the image of his mother which he carries to his final resting place and which he cannot exorcise. Thus it casts a shadow as an archetype of disgrace and fatality.

Mother, death, regeneration. In his exile in Macau, in the cocoon of his home, in that room redolent of opium dreams, in that "east of the east of the Orient", Camilo Pessanha gave voice to his deathly dialogue in the final, lethal Orient, a larval spot for rebirth, obsessive, renewing death, the single avatar of purification.

Painting by victor Hugo Marreiros (mixed media)

NOTES

1Bachelard, Gaston: La Poétique de l'espace. Presses Universitaires de France, 1957, p. 23.

2Amaro, Carlos:"Camilo Pessanha"in Pires, Daniel, Homenagem a Camilo Pessanha, ICM, 1990 (originally published in Ilustração, nº 6,16th March, 1926).

3Bachelard, Gaston: op. cit., p.46.

4"The rooms of houses are equivalent to vital organs... and the child spontaneously recognises the windows as eyes and feels the cellar and the passageways as innards..." Durand, Gilbert: As Estruturas Antropológicas do Imaginário, Presença, Lisbon, 1989, p. 168.

5There is opportunity for a complementary study on the other roles of the house, namely its place in the diachronism and persistent changes which it undergoes over the years.

6Cf. Heidegger, Martin: El Ser y el Tiempo, F. C. E., Madrid, 1984.

7Costa, Sebastião: "Camilo Pessanha"in Seara Nova, nº 85,29th April, 1926, quoted in Pires, Daniel: op. cit., p. 10.

8Costa, Sebastião, ibid., p. 9.

9Castro, Alberto Osório de: "Camilo Pessanha em Macau", Atlântico, 1942, quoted in Pires, Daniel: ibid., p. 50.

10Rego, José de Carvalho e: in Notícias de Macau, 11th February, 1968, quoted in Pires, Daniel: ibid., p. 30.

11Ibid., p. 26.

12Costa, Sebastião: ibid., p. 13.

13Quadros, António: "Introduçã à vida e obra de Camilo Pessanha" in Clepsidra e poemas diversos, Publicações Europa-América, p. 38.

14Schopenhauer, Arthur: Studies on Pessimism, Riverside Press, Edinburgh, 1937, p. 17.

15De Quincey, Thomas: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Harmondsworth, 1971, pp. 82-83.

16For example "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Black Cat".

17Costa, Sebastião: ibid., p. 10.

18Costa, Sebastião: ibid..

*A distinction should be drawn between the original home and the secondary home, in other words, the space where the child discovers the world and peoples it with familiar places, objects and mysteries, and another, secondary place which man builds and inhabits which may or may not have the same spatial structure and emotional charge as the original home. This step brings into play a series of cultural rules. Camilo Pessanha's home in Macau belonged, obviously, to the second category.