The most established Portuguese poet of the 20th century to live in Macau died 90 years ago this year, but what remains in memory of Camilo Pessanha, author of the anthology of poems Clepsidra, is just a statue and a street named after him: “Pe san ié kai”.
The apparent absence of Pessanha in the city where the poet spent 32 years of his life, can be explained in a few ways, according to scholars: namely the “minority” character of Portuguese literature in Macau, accentuated by the fact that his work was poetry, and a particular style of poetry at that – symbolism.
According to the President of the Portuguese Language Teaching and Research Centre Macau, this was because Pessanha was “a Portuguese poet” in a “Chinese city”.
“There are 600,000 people living in Macau and 20,000 speak Portuguese. Portuguese from Portugal total about 4,000. Of these, how many read poetry?” asks Carlos André, who runs the Polytechnic Institute Centre.
In addition, “Pessanha wasn’t orthodox, he was exactly the opposite. He was a rather marginal poet in his time and continues to be today. Even in literature, he is a poet of a minority movement, that of symbolism”.
Not only did his symbolist style of poetry “count against him”, but since it was also an “eccentric” literary current which “didn’t last,” Pessanha was not “particularly prolific”, which “helps to understand why he is not well remembered,” the academic adds.
Pessanha is, however, “the greatest figure in Portuguese literature in Macau,” and Carlos André admits it is “strange” that, when entering the São Miguel de Arcanjo Cemetery, his grave is not easy to identify.
André rejects notions that this is because Pessanha was critical of Macau, a place he described as “a hissing, gossipy and ignorant environment”.
“In his time that may have been important, but today no one remembers that,” André says.
Fernanda Gil Costa, director of the Department of Portuguese at the University of Macau shares this sentiment: “The relationship between poets and their contemporaries does not normally resonate in a very decisive way in the future.”
For the researcher, Pessanha’s contemporary absence relates more to “the simple reason that he belonged to a linguistic minority in Macau” and because he “was a silent figure”, who inscribed himself into “a rather elitist poetry movement”.
Architect Carlos Marreiros, president of the Cultural Institute of Macau between 1989 and 1992, explains that “there were several ideas” previously put forward to immortalize Pessanha, including a House of Poetry and a museum. But during that time of bustling activity in anticipation of the transfer of Macau to China, a lot of other things needed to be taken care of.
“We didn’t even have a cultural centre, or an art museum. We were blazing new trails, to consolidate the international music festival, launching the arts festival, preparing a network of public libraries,” explains Marreiros.
But there is one project that is still in the works: a Macanese Museum House, slated for the neighbourhood of San Lázaro, awaiting authorization and funding from the Government, which will reconstruct a traditional house from the end of the 19th century, and have a section dedicated to Pessanha.
“It will have manuscripts, photographs, Camilo Pessanha signings and a media room where the recreated voice of Pessanha recites his poems,” he describes.
– A gravestone in Chinese is his final home –
Many have visited the tomb of Camilo Pessanha in Macau over the years, a discreet grave with a tombstone inscribed in Chinese, wedged between ornate graves in the São Miguel de Arcanjo Cemetery.
“There wasn’t a poet or a writer who didn’t ask about Camilo Pessanha. When people related to literature came here, off we went to show [the grave],” researcher Luís Sá Cunha, who was part of a group of intellectuals and Pessanha lovers, recalls.
At the time, Sá Cunha, who still knows the way to the poet’s final resting place by heart, voiced his concern, repeated by many, that the grave was difficult to find – only identifiable by small photograph of the poet, with his full black beard.
Located at the end of the cemetary between three rows of graves, without any pathways to separate them, visitors need to climb the surrounding rocks just to get a closer look. On the headstone, only the first sentence of the inscription is legible “To the blessed memory of the poet”, ending with “from your son J.M.P.”, a reference to his son João Manuel Pessanha, who is also buried there.
In the 1990s Luís Sá Cunha presented a proposal for a new gravesite. It was “a simple design” with “four columns and a cover”, but it needed government authorization. However, time passed and the endorsement never happened.
“I insisted two, three times and realized it was going to fail,” he says. “Then there was the Handover and a kind of wall arose,” he says, remembering how the Portuguese were particularly busy at the time and more concerned about other things, which contributed to the neglect of the idea.
At that time there was space around the grave for such a structure, but “now it’s not worth it anymore, the [surrounding] graves are already very close”.
– A little known great-great-grandfather –
Nine decades after the death of the poet, his great-grand daughter and two of his great-great-grandchildren vaguely remember stories of a man who “wrote some things” but of whom they do not even have a photograph.
“My mother told of how he smoked opium and was a Freemason,” says Ana Jorge, the great-granddaughter of the poet, who she never got to meet. “I was 15 or 16 years old when she told me that he was a poet, but not much attention was paid to that fact.”
Ana Jorge’s fragile memories are complemented by those of her children Filomeno and Victor (Pessanha’s great-great-grandchildren), who also heard their grandmother, Maria Rosa dos Remédios do Espírito Santo (Pessanha’s granddaughter) now deceased, talking about Pessanha. Maria Rosa, , was 12 when he died, on March 1, 1926.
“Camilo Pessanha supported my grandmother [with money] from the age of seven to twelve. He didn’t really like his son João Manuel, saying he didn’t behave. João Manuel was always out, and therefore Pessanha supported my grandmother instead,” Victor Jorge, 66, recalls, holding a photograph Maria Rosa’s father João Manuel Pessanha, wearing an official merchant marine uniform, and referring to the difficult relationship that existed between father and son.
Everything indicates that João Manuel was the result of a relationship between Pessanha and a Chinese concubine. Despite being his only consensually recognized child, the relationship between the two was distant. João Manuel was born in 1896 and was baptized as a child of unknown parents. Only in 1900 did Pessanha acknowledge him, but in his will, the poet left most of his possessions to his new partner, Kuoc Ngan Yeng, known as “Silver Eagle”, and not to his son.
It was only through their conversations with their grandmother that Pessanha’s ancestors learned that they were descended from someone who had made a name for himself in literature.
“The conversation came up when were looking through some things and found some old photographs,” Victor recalls. ‘Grandmother, who is this man with a cane and a full beard?’’ they asked. ‘He’s your great great-grandfather,’ she replied, and began to tell his story.
“She said Camillo Pessanha was a lawyer, had Chinese women, and even learned to write Chinese. Then he became a judge,” Victor recalls, estimating he [Victor] would have been about 20 years old at the time.
And a writer? “Yes, she knew he had been a poet. He also had a role of responsibility in the government and he owned many antiques,” Victor says.
Filomeno remembers learning about his ancestry when was over 30 and Maria Rosa was approached for an interview by a journalist: “Grandmother spoke of him, but not much. She said he was good person, he wrote a few things, and had good relationships with many people, Portuguese, Chinese and Macanese.”
Before discovering the surprising family connection, both Victor and Filomeno actually knew very well who Camilo Pessanha was, since “his whole face with his beard”, passed from hand to hand on a daily basis, as he used to be featured on the old version of the 100 pataca note.
Ana Jorge, who is now almost 83, and her children are Macanese in all aspects: in their facial features reflecting their Portuguese and Chinese mix, their accents, their bilingualism and expressions.
Perhaps because of the distance, both temporal and geographic, this fourth-generation family who speak Portuguese, tempered with Chinese and Macanese patois but don’t even own a copy of Pessanha’s most famous work, Clepsidra, are removed from the work of the poet.
“I just glanced over the poems,” Victor comments.
Filomeno, now 59 and a member of Tuna Macanese, says he read some of the verses after their grandmother told him about the family connection. Musicalizing Pessanha’s poems did cross his mind, but they were too long and cutting them was out of the question.
“I write a lot of songs in Portuguese and Patua. I didn’t study music, but I am a musician,” he says, referring to his artistic vein. “I think I inherited that from him”.
– Unconventional poet in a conservative city –
In Macau, when the subject of Camilo Pessanha is raised, it is hard to tell where the man ends and the myth begins, with some recalling him as affable, exotic and ahead of his time, but also as caustic, hallucinatory and addicted to opium.
“I grew up listening to the stories my father told about Camilo Pessanha. He had a very peculiar, characteristic personality,” says António Conceição Júnior, recalling the memories of his father, Antonio Maria da Conceição, who was a student of Pessanha’s at the Liceu de Macau.
“Socially he was very peculiar. But if we compare him with [other famous Portuguese writers] Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Mário de Sá Carneiro, or with Fernando Pessoa himself, I don’t see any of them as being vulgar,” he says, referring to their unconventional lifestyles.
There was a common notion in Macau at the time, propagated in books, of a unusual man who was often in an hallucinating state.
“Slim, squalid, the bristly beard, hair plastered to his forehead, half-naked on the bed, voluptuously inhaling from a long pipe over the yellow flame of a crystal lamp, projecting a disfigured shadow on the darkened walls, with the hypnotic expression of an opium addict,” is how Danilo Barreiros describes him in his book The Testament of Camilo Pessanha.
For Conceição Júnior, this type of image is the result, at least in part, of a conservative outlook in Macau in the early 20th century.
“This was a small village, as it still is today, but at the time much more so,” he says.
Pessanha was “very distracted” and also “had his escapes. Opium was common at that time and it wasn’t a sin,” he counters. “There were things that were weird, they weren’t abnormal, but they were out of the norm. I would just say that Camilo wasn’t conventional,” he says, adding that yes, there were times when he would receive guests naked, although covered with a sheet, a detail he considers “an anecdote” and unimportant.
The truth is that it “caused some discomfort in Macau,” a city where “only a small number of people” actually knew that he wrote.
The discomfort was not only due to his eccentricity, but also because Pessanha was critical of Macau, describing it as “backwards, gossipy and loutish, miserable in all respects.”
Despite now being remembered as a poet, in life Pessanha was better known as a teacher, and also a lawyer, a judge and conservator of the land register.
However he was criticized not only for his personal behavior, but also on a professional level. In 1904, two lawyers accused him of “disorganization in the performance of his judicial duties, negligence in relation to records of the conservatory, absence in the place of work, corruption”, according to a chronology prepared by the Portuguese National Library.
Between 1894 and 1926, the period in which he lived in Macau, he was also interested in Chinese culture and language, collecting antiques. He became friends with José Vicente Jorge, a Macanese intellectual, who cultivated his love of Chinese poetry and whom Pessanha considered a friend and teacher.
“Unlike most of the Portuguese who came to Macau, as soon as he arrived, Pessanha began to study Chinese, a language that delighted him,” Pedro Barreiros, grandson of José Vicente Jorge, recalls.
Having started Chinese lessons in 1895, Pessanha translated, with the support of Vicente Jorge, eight Chinese elegies in 1914. Barreiros recalls the friendship between the poet and his grandfather as being based on “great admiration, mutual respect, sharing many ideas, tastes and common activities, such as law, language, Chinese poetry and art and, of course Freemasonry”.
The impression Pessanha made on José Vicente Jorge transpired across generations.
“My grandfather and my Aunt Amália came to live in our house and, with my mother and my father, made the presence of the poet permanent. From an early age I was ‘wrapped’ in the music of his poems and at the age of 16 I drew my first portrait of Pessanha, which my mother cut out and pasted in her copy of Clepsidra,” he recalls.
Such was the friendship between the two that Pessanha even helped this aunt Amália, daughter of José Vicente Jorge, to go to study in Lisbon, something unusual for women at the time.
This “little girl” as Pessanha affectionately called her in a letter to Ana de Castro Osório, “unlike all this riffraff, [is] truly anxious to instruct herself”. She was also the only person to bring flowers on the day of the poet’s funeral, on March 2, 1926.
Today, Barreiros is an expert on Pessanha, and still has manuscripts: “I have always been in love with his poems, all marked by an equal perfection, which I have rarely found again. Through the stories that my mother, grandfather and my uncles, who were his students, told me, I’m jealous not to have had him as a teacher myself”.