Sin in Portugal
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Sin in Portugal By Stanley Edgar Hyman Jose Maiua Eca de Queiroz (1843-1900) is said to be the greatest Portuguese novelist. I have no opinion on the matter, since I have...
...another is an unprincipled scoundrel...
...A doctor prettily explains displacement: "The heart is a term which usually serves us, for decency's sake, to designate another organ...
...Cousin Bazilio tells of the seduction of an innocent Lisbon housewife, Luiza, by her sophisticated cousin, and its fearful consequences in blackmail by a servant and Luiza's illness and death...
...The Sin of Father Amaro is extraordinarily compelling despite one big defect...
...The other two books are tragic novels, and it is their themes that I intend to discuss here...
...The best realism has always been poetic and symbolist...
...To the novelists of our time, these details would be indifferent or mildly interesting...
...It is as though Kingsley Amis had published a novel with one chapter by General Lew Wallace...
...Eça is this sort of symbolist-realist, and his work shimmers with image and metaphor...
...The other thing that contributes to the sensuality of these novels is a sense, lost in our time, of the possibility of sordidity and degradation...
...a pure white moth" flutters around the candle flames...
...In a deeper sense, the novels do not really warn or preach...
...another takes his siestas with a mistress...
...he continues their affair in the sexton's house, with Toto, the sexton's paralyzed daughter, listening and screaming: "The dogs are getting on each other...
...Whether the restraint is imposed by censorship and the times, or is self-imposed, it is essential...
...A figure of perfect goodness puts things right (recovers Luiza's letters, brings Amelia to confession and repentance) but the woman must nevertheless expiate her sin by death...
...Amaro talks of the Mass while squeezing Amelia's knee between his...
...Eça de Queiroz had the luck to live in a culture with a sense of sin, the brains to know that the realistic and the symbolic enhance one another, the talent to produce richness with great economy...
...The foreshadowings of later events in the first 50 pages of Cousin Bazilio make an impressive list...
...Like the Euripides of Hippolytus and The Bacchae, Eça doesn't appear to like the god, but he does not underestimate the god's power...
...the guilty man eventually laughs it off...
...One priest dies of apoplexy from gluttony...
...A cuckoo clock strikes in the first sentence...
...the discoverer or witness of the sin also dies...
...In Cousin Bazilio, Eça has some fun with what I assume is the same Portuguese word...
...and, loveliest touch of all, one is interested in nothing but cooking, so that his Sunday sermons consist entirely of recipes...
...Luiza stroking her own soft body after Bazilio pays his first call...
...its rule is tyrannical and aimed at breaking the spirit...
...says Juliana, the servant), and at one point things fall into farce (when word gets out about how well Juliana is living, hordes of governesses, cooks, gardeners, coachmen, postillions, footmen, porters, commissionaires and cook's helpers apply for positions...
...He is not the equal of Flaubert...
...Father Amaro is a sermon against clerical celibacy, and both novels are demonstrations that one deadly sin rapidly begets the other six...
...If the priests in the book are villains, the anti-clericals and radicals are just as unprincipled and almost as detestable...
...The Sin of Father Amaro takes full advantage of the tensions inherent in a Roman Catholic culture...
...He is certainly very impressive...
...Realistic" and "naturalistic" were banners in 19th century French literature against vapid romances and tales of glamorous highlife...
...Now we have The Sin of Father Amaro, translated by Nan Flanagan (St Martin's Press, 352 pp., $5.95...
...The blackmail scenes approach melodrama ("I give the orders now...
...Jorge's study contains a "plaster statue, very much the worse for wear, of a bacchante in delirium...
...But he is a very considerable novelist, and one should probably learn Portuguese to read the rest of his work...
...Father Amaro is full of deliberate sex symbols...
...a third spends his siestas brutally raping the peasant girls on, fittingly, the threshing floor...
...he is sometimes soft where Flaubert is always hard...
...Nevertheless the book has great power and beauty, and its pictures of the bored seducer (clearly a cruel selfportrait) and the spiteful servant are masterpieces...
...Its image of the clergy is devastating...
...Our novelists, who put everything on the page relentlessly, soon come to produce no more effect than a seed catalogue...
...I have no opinion on the matter, since I have never read any other...
...Clerical celibacy is shown to be repulsive in principle and almost non-existent in practice...
...a friend of Luiza's husband Jorge reads from a play about the punishment of an adulterous wife...
...Bazilio sings to Luiza, and an old fool in the room praises his voice, remarking: "You possess a most powerful and excellent organ...
...The book is criminally marred by one chapter in which Eça gets earnest and gives his hero a reverent rationalist vision of Christ's Passion...
...Bazilio takes Luiza to a house of assignation that smells of damp and mildew, and seduces her on a bed with a patched mattress and dirty sheets...
...Both novels share a pattern...
...The priest was as desperately infatuated as the virgin, and is as much seduced...
...At one ugly point in Cousin Bazilio, Bazilio tries to convince a friend of Luiza's attractiveness "by adducing lascivious episodes and giving a detailed physiological description of her person...
...Scapulars, rosaries, images and relics are elaborately mocked...
...The erotic tease is one of the longest since Pamela, and well before page 206, when the priest and the girl finally go to bed together, the tension has snapped...
...they evoke pity and terror and purge them in catharsis...
...In the 20th century, "realism" has come to mean listless English family chronicles and "naturalism" to mean grimy slices of American life...
...Mies van der Rohe's slogan, "Less is more," should be over every novelist's typewriter...
...its teaching is obscurantist and absurd...
...Amelia is ashamed to write a love letter to the priest "with the same pen, wet with the same ink," with which she has just accepted Joäo's proposal of marriage...
...Our novelists would have given a blow-by-blow account of Luiza's habits and catalogued all her plumbing...
...Everything is done by understatement and suggestion...
...It's the one thing in life worth living for" is a priestly opinion about sex...
...Father Amaro, "breathing like a bull," deflowers Amelia while an old procuress crouches in the cellar...
...a photograph of Jorge has crossed swords mounted over it...
...Abbot Ferrâo preaches the author's message, a religion of Christian love and charity, in which "one tear shed in sincerity was sufficient for the remission of a life of sin...
...In a sense, these novels are tracts: Father Amaro warns that the wages of sin is childbirth, and Cousin Bazilio that the wages of sin is insolence from the servants...
...the confessional is a place for lewd whispers...
...A context somewhat softens this...
...The Relic was published by Knopf in 1925, in a translation by Aubrey F. G. Bell (the title page says from the Spanish...
...The Relic is an outrageously funny satire about a religious hypocrite who makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to inherit his aunt's fortune, and ruins it all by the old parcel switch...
...Father Amaro himself dreams of a return of the Inquisition to punish his enemies, and his chief weapon in the seduction of Amelia is The Canticles of Jesus, a work of pious pornography...
...I should say the finest organ in all our Lisbonese society...
...The Church's God is "a Being who only knew how to deal out suffering and death...
...a cigarette holder is carved with "Venus mounted voluptuously over a tamed lion...
...In the seminary, Amaro had visions of the Virgin as a beautiful naked girl, and he later dresses Amelia in a cloak presented to the Virgin and embraces her...
...We can readily imagine the episodes and the details...
...The symbols of Christianity give an erotic frisson to the seduction...
...This time it is not a simple matter of villain and victim...
...The rest of Eça de Queiroz's books, so far as I know, are at present unavailable in English —the familiar fate of a major writer in a minor literature...
...The Relic is a joy to read if one skips chapter three, and the threadbare plot adds to the fun...
...These terms do not really convey the quality of the books...
...True Christianity is represented by one decent layman, Joâo, Amelia's fiance, who hates the clergy but admires Jesus, and by the saintly Abbot Ferrâo, Amelia's salvation, who dismisses the wicked priests as "Pharisees...
...The portrait of the Roman Catholic Church is quite as devastating...
...Devout old women are shown to be rotten with psychotic fantasies, and the one devout layman in the book, a bringer of grace to the troops, is caught in a homosexual act with a sergeant...
...Freud credited writers with discovering the truths of psychoanalysis before he did, and in that sense Eça de Queiroz is a very knowing pre-Freudian...
...IN his introduction to Cousin Bazilio, Federico de Onis speaks of Eça as "the introducer of French realism and naturalism into Portugal...
...Amaro says that as her confessor he will "govern her with a rod of iron...
...Only to the extent that we can feel Amelia's horror as Toto screams, or blush for shame with Luiza, do their acts acquire significance...
...Eça can render smouldering passion in a detail: Amelia's saving the hair out of Father Amaro's comb...
...A decade ago Noonday reprinted The Relic in Bell's translation (2S9 pp., $1.25) and published Cousin Bazilio in a clotted translation by Roy Campbell (343 pp., $1.25...
...The novels of Eça de Queiroz made me realize how much more sensual 19th century fiction is than current fiction...
...The Sin of Father Amaro is about the seduction of a virgin by a priest in a Portuguese provincial town, and its fearful consequences in her death in childbirth and his arranging the murder of their child...
...the sense of sin is a powerful aphrodisiac in the book...
...Their names, Amaro and Amelia, seem to suggest that it is amor that has conquered...
Vol. 46 • March 1963 • No. 5
