"António Botto's Impossible Queerness of Being"

Portuguese Modernisms Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts ❖ Edited by Steffen Dix and Jeronimo Pizarro / LEGENDA Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing 2011 CHAPTER 7 ❖ Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness of Bein Anna M. Kiobucka The life, writings and critical fortune of Antonio Botto (i897—1959) present a singularly complex case study in the epistemology of the Portuguese closet.' Far from disguising or obscuring his homosexuality, as many of his male and female contemporaries did as a matter of fact and survival, he just as matter-of-fictly wrote candid and often joyful homoerotic verse, prose and drama that were acknowledged and discussed as such in the literary and journalistic milieu of the day. While Botto's contribution to the enterprise of formal experimentation carried out by Fernando Pessoa and some of his leading fellow modernists (such as Mario de Sa-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros) was at best tangential — although the free form of his lyric had certainly been enabled by their example and that of their precursors, most notably Antonio Nobre — at the same time he remained a much-debated central figure of the literary environments of the so-called 'first' and 'second' Portuguese modernisms, due precisely to his overt textual and existential enactment of an unorthodox identity that responded in a unique way to the fin-de-siecle and modernist fascination with gender and, particularly, with male homosexuality.2 This enactment opened up, in turn, pathways of literary and subjective expression without precedent in the Portuguese language, as Botto forged smglehandedly and seemingly out of thin air an entirely original discourse of poetic homotextuality. In a brief but incisive critical assessment published over twenty years ago, Joaquim Manuel Magalhaes pointed to this aspect of Botto's oeuvre as the mam reason for its enduring value; Magalhaes's call for a critical reappraisal of the poet's legacy has so far remained largely unheeded, however, in the mainstream of Portuguese literary history, criticism and pedagogy.3 The radically groundbreaking sweep of Botto's homoerotic poetics can best be appreciated by surveying briefly the history of the representations of male homosexuality in Portuguese literature. For centuries, beginning with the bawdy Galician-Portuguese canti^as d'escaniho e mal dizer in the Middle Ages and all the way up to Sa-Carneiro's foundational 1913 novella A Confissao de Lucio [Lucia's Confession], the literary conditions of discursive possibility for representing same-sex love and desire oscillated between satire and tragedy, with few if any alternatives 111 between.4 The satirical vein prevailed all the way up to the astonishingly Foucauldian emergence of the first developed homosexual character in Portuguese Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness of Being hi fiction, Eca de Queiros's Libaninho in O Crime do Padre Amaro [The Crime of Father Amaro], originally published in T875, or a mere five years following what Michel Foucault famously designated as the approximate 'date ot birth' into the episteme of Western culture of the homosexual as a species.5 The figure of Libaninho sprang out from Eca's imagination as a fully formed parodic stereotype of an effeminate gay man: it is the social spectacle of his speaking and moving body, rather than any insinuation of an actual practice of sexual relations (which is only referred to at the very end of the novel), that makes Libaninho's identity manifest to those who apprehend him, including, most importantly, Eca's readers — so much so that twenty-first-century undergraduates at a North American university, who are reading the novel 111 English translation, will recognize Libaninho's 'sexual orientation' (to deploy the lexicon of their own episteme) unhesitatingly as soon as he appears on the narrative scene.6 From the unspoken obviousness of Libaninho's identification and the comic-relief function of his presence in the plot ot O Crime do Padre Amaro, the pendulum has to swing quite far to reach the discursively over- determined construct of 'sexual inversion' embodied by the eponymous protagonist of Abel Botelho's 1891 novel Barao de Lavos [The Baron of Lauos]. The Baron's homosexuality is as loquaciously over-analysed by the narrator as Libaninho's is tacitly inferred, and throughout the novel he is clearly headed toward a disastrous end as the only possible outcome for the appalling horror of his being. What Libaninho and the Baron do share, however, is their narrative existence as objects of a public spectacle: whether their destiny is to generate amusement or disdain and revulsion, they figure in their respective fictional worlds as self-enclosed targets of homophobic curiosity and entertainment. Although A Confissdo de Lucio takes a dramatic departure from this barely solidified representational paradigm, it still emphatically places same-sex love within the realm of tragic incompatibility of moral and affective imperatives that can only result in death and disgrace. Viewed against this summarily sketched background, Botto's lyric persona, as embodied in various guises throughout Calicoes (Songs), the volume of collected poems he published eight times between 1921 and 1956 m progressively expanded editions, stands out as an emphatic rejoinder to Coufissao's tortured insistence that it is 'impossible' to 'possess a creature of our own sex'.7 Indeed, the possibility of male same-sex desire and its urgently pursued (or, on occasion, sensuously deferred) fulfilment is not ontologically or epistemologically queried but simply taken as a pre-existing given in the textual world of Cancoes, where dramatic suspense and versatile mobility of subject positions and intersubjective relations derive instead from the infinite variety of love that is all the more eloquent for knowing it has been historically considered unspeakable.lS Botto's friend and champion Fernando Pessoa expressed the subjectively overpowering condition of unspeakability clashing with desire in the unattributed words of a poetic persona that has been labelled, with understandable but perhaps excessive caution, as his 'anonymous gay heteronym': All, se soubesscs com que magoa eu uso Este terror de amar-te, sem poder Ncm dizer-te que te amo, de confuso De tao senti-lo, nem o amor perder.9 112 Anna Klobucka (Ah, if you knew with what pain I endure This horror of loving you without being able To tell you my love, so dazed am I by this Emotion, and without being able to shed it.] It is impossible to ascertain whether Pessoa ever showed his unpublished poem to Botto after they became friends sometime in the early 1920s, but Botto's following brief lyric, included in his 1925 collection Piquetias Esculturas (Small Sculptures, later folded into Cancocs), reads practically like a direct response to Pessoa's 'gay heteronym"s repeated protestations of the tragic disparity between what is felt and what can be put into words, between affective self-awareness and the inability to share it with the desired other: Conversando a sos contigo, Desfruto o prazer imenso De nao pensar no que digo E de dizer o que penso. E mais uina vez Afirmo Sem receio de que seja desmentido: — A maior fehcidade E ser-se compreendido.10 [When I talk with you, in straying Words, my pleasure finds its brink: I don't think of what 1 am saying And 1 say all that I think. And once again 1 affirm — Deny it who ever would? — There is no happiness Like being just understood.] The miraculous outspokenness of Cancde.< can be further illuminated by observing that what can appear as an improbably hemophilic environment of the literary Lisbon of the 1920s, into which 13otto emerged from his humble working-class family background to quickly become a celebrated poet, was also intensely — and more predictably — homophobic. Perhaps the most concise illustration of this claim may be found in the cameo portrayal of Botto — as the poet Joao Salvador — in Jose Regio's novel A Vclha Casa (namely in the volume Vidas Sao Vidas, originally published in 1966) and in the complicated and contradictory reaction to Salvador shared by the novel's autobiographic protagonist Lelito and his circle of friends: 'Que se passara, em verdade, no mtimo deste homem?' pensou algumas vezes. 'Quern sera ele?" 1 )ecididamente, comecara a admira-lo, no sen gencro; mas sem deixar de tambem o desprezar, 011 ate, em certos momentos, o achar enjoativo 011 repugnante. De resto ... a outros componentes e aderentes do grupo se estendia esse niisto de admiracao e desprezo.... " |What is really going on inside that man?' he thought once in a while. 'Who is he?' He had decidedly begun to admire him, after a fashion; but without ceasing to despise him or even, on some occasions, to find him nauseating or Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness or Being 113 repugnant. Moreover ... other members and followers ot the group also partook in this combination of admiration and disdain....] As Regio's narrator also notes, one particular strand of the milieu's negative reaction to Joao Salvador originated among those who were his 'colegas em tocios sentidos, embora alguns secretos' [equals in every way, albeit some of them secret] but who, contrary to him, were incapable of verbalizing their collective singularity in their art: 'Os versos destes eram vulgares, por isso eram estes que mais o odiavam e invejavam' [Their own poems were ordinary, which is why they were the ones who hated and envied him the most].'" Like Joao Salvador, Botto embodied a secret that was as open as it could conceivably be (and then some), but that to those surrounding him — who included Pessoa, identified in Regio's novel (under his real-life name) as Salvador's protector — remained as unspeakable as ever. One contemporary witness offers an account of Pessoa's apparent delight in telling anecdotes of Botto's rhetorical exploits — off-colour jokes, seductive incursions, verbal sparrings — and voicing them 'em torn gozao ... aflautajndo] a voz' [in a mocking tone ... pitching his voice high].'3 As a representational device, Pessoa's vocal mannerism — imitating voice patterns meant to be apprehended as signifying Botto's gayness — carries a peculiarly loaded performative charge. It could be contemplated in terms of the enunciatory (and denunciatory) dynamic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in the context of her analysis of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: 'the theatricization of a closet-figured-as-spectacle to preserve the privacy of someone else's closet- occluded-as-viewpoint'.'4 While a reconsideration of the Botto—Pessoa relationship is not my main purpose here, I will say that the fluid and equivocal complicity between the evidence of Botto's spectacularly uncloseted persona and the dizzying contredanse of revelation and occlusion of dissident desires engaged in by Pessoa's heteronymous coterie of alter egos is likely to be a promising point of departure for such a discussion.'-' It is also worth recalling here that Botto's life in Portugal took a decisive turn for the worse, ultimately leading to his self-exile in Brazil (where he lived out the rest of his life in abject poverty, shared with his common-law wife Carmmda Silva Rodrigues, who accompanied him abroaci), when he was fireci from his public service job in 1942 for three specif ic infractions, two of which were of elocutionary nature. As the official record of his dismissal states, he was accused of 'dirigi[r( galanteios e frases de sentido eqm'voco a um seu colega, denunciando tendencias condenadas pela moral social' (addressing flirtatious and equivocal statements to a male co-worker, thereby demonstrating tendencies condemned by the social morals] and 'fazer versos e recita-los durante as horas regulamentares do funcionamento da reparticao' [making up and reciting poems during regular working hours of his office|.16 It appears that the unguarded freedom of Botto's speech, more so than any other aspect of his presence and social behaviour, was what determined with particular force the sheer outrage of his existence, notwithstanding Joao Gaspar Simoes's characteristically bizarre assertion that 'era, na verdade, nos olhos que a sodomia de Antonio Botto avultava, coisa que, alias, acontece quase sempre com os sodomitas' (it was, in fact, through his eyes that Botto's sodomy showed most clearly, as indeed almost always happens with the sodomites].17 Botto stood out (pun 114 Anna Klobucka intended) because of what he said and because of how he spoke — because of what Maria da Conceicao Fernandes calls uncritically his 'preciosismo narcisico ... forma de chamar a atencao geral para a sua pessoa' [narcissistic preciousness ... a way of calling general attention to his person], buttressing her claim with the testimony of the writer Luis Forjaz Trigueiros who told her, in a personal interview, that 'o poeta quase sempre se conciuzia como se estivesse num palco, proferindo as suas frases com um certo empolamento dramatico' [the poet almost always behaved as if he were on stage, expressing himself with a kind of dramatic pompousness[ and that 'esse sen modo afectado "aborrecia as pessoas" e que as levava, muitas vezes, a afastarem-se do poeta' [this affected behaviour 'annoyed people' and often caused them to distance themselves from the poet].'S Rereading the spectacle of Botto's public presence as, to put it anachronistically, an out-and-proud gay man — spectacle attested to, albeit in a largely homophobic or at best ambivalent key, in many contemporary and retrospective testimonials — remains an unaccomplished and urgent critical task to undertake. In the remaining space of this essay, however, my goal is far more modest: to begin to consider an often acknowledged but barely, if ever, discussed aspect of Botto's life and work — his exceedingly robust and polyvalent penchant for self- invention — and to relate it tentatively to the improbable, and in his day and time ultimately unsustainable, queerness of his public existence. I argue that Botto not only fashioned himself as a gay icon in the relatively confined context of the literary and artistic circles of Lisbon, but also constructed a comprehensively developed alternative reality, international if not global in scope, in which he could truly thrive as such; in which his homoerotic poetry and nonconformist social behaviour provoked neither scorn nor titillation but only unqualified admiration and respect. It has been a common, and not entirely unjustified, critical practice to file away this aspect of Botto's creativity under the rubric of unbridled megalomania.'9 Without disputing the property of this label, I wish to suggest that specific products of Botto's undeniably prodigious vanity not only deserve to be contemplated as integrally meaningful components of his life's work, but furthermore may be related to his predicament as an unapologetically gay artist of extremely humble origins who managed to rise into the ranks of Portuguese cultural elites in spite of his poverty and seemingly complete lack of formal education.20 If homosocial desire can be said to be the glue that binds together the participants in Pessoa's comedy of heteronymous multiplication, I would venture that Botto's virtual reality had a similar function of creating self-fulfilling conditions of possibility where none had existed; in other words, of producing a hospitably homophile and class-blind env- ironment to cushion him from the harsh realities of a social and cultural setting that for the most part was neither of those things. It would be difficult to find a better epigraph to herald this discussion than the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Ancirade's remark in his notably gentle and moving obituary of Botto (who died in 1959 after being hit by a truck or van on Avenida Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro): Nao me interessa discutir se o Boto dos poemas finais valia ou nao o Boto triunfal de outros tempos. Interessa-me essa fidelidade do poeta a si mesmo, esse orgulho de nao renunciar a poesia e de se considerar um prmcipe do mundo, Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness or- Being 115 esse poder de mampular niitos e dar-lhes unia existencia, lima densidade social. Nesse sentido, coube-lhe unia forma de felicidade que nenhum mfortunio externo podia atingir. Boto criava o sen rcino."' [I am not interested in debating whether the Boto who wrote his final poems was worthy or not of the triumphant Boto of times past. What I care about is the poet's faithfulness to himself, the pride he took in not relinquishing poetry and in considering himself a prince of the world, his power to manipulate myths and to give them an existence, a social density. In this sense, his was a happiness that no misfortune could reach. Boto created his own kingdom.] For the vast majority of readers, the only available insight into Botto's mythmaking prowess is likely to have come from numerous self-promotional blurbs, featuring comments from press reviews and assorted literary, cultural and even political celebrities, which from the 1930s on occupied an increasingly ample space m successive editions of his writings. Botto claimed that collections of his poems, as well as his children's stories and plays, had been translated into many languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, an assertion supported by enthusiastic praise from the likes of Luigi Pirandello, Miguel Unamuno, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Lawrence Olivier, Gabriela Mistral, and many others, which he interspersed among his poems and cited in prefaces or press interviews. In effect, only two translations of Botto's texts appeared in his lifetime: The Children's Booh, translated by Alice Lawrence Oram and published in Lisbon by Bertrand, and the volume of Songs in Fernando Pessoa's English, which was printed in 194s."2 It is therefore reasonably safe to assume the purely fictional nature of comments such as the following from Woolf (who had died in 1941, seven years before the actual publication of Songs): Assombroso predestinado e Artista de toda a imensidade nao atingida este Antonio Botto do livro Cancocs, traduzido, para o ingles, por Fernando Pessoa. Com mais tempo e vagar volto a falar desta obra no 'Suplemento literario' do Times' | Prodigiously predestined, an Artist of unsurpassable immensity, this Antonio Botto of Songs, translated into English by Fernando Pessoa. With more time and leisure, I will return to this book in The Times Literary Supplement]."'' A much broader, nuanced, and at times utterly fascinating picture of Botto's lifelong enterprise of self-invention emerges from his archive, housed in the Portu- guese Biblioteca Nacional. Although the archive contains almost no materials from before 1947 (the year of Botto's emigration to Brazil), it is a vast resource that in a curious fashion replicates some of the mechanisms of the closet that both did and did not circumscribe the living poet's existence. The invitingly titled file 'Caderno proibido' |Forbidden Notebook], composed for the most part of both softcore and hardcore erotic verse (the latter considerably more graphic than even the boldest of Cannes), is freely handed out to researchers, but other, seemingly less objectionable files remain off limits (namely those that contain photographs, of Botto himself and of others, as well as results of medical tests). Many of the texts found in the archive, such as manuscript notes and poem drafts, but also newspaper clippings with Botto's enmicas and interviews published in the Brazilian press, contribute to the writer's autobiographic project, two of wTose major themes I will now briefly describe. The first leitmotiv to register is the constitution of an affective community of gay artists who could be evoked, and who would occasionally even speak out in \\6 Anna Ki.obucka their own voices, as Botto's peers and admirers. One such imaginary friend was the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Botto had a collection of Nijinsky's photos in various roles, clipped from newspapers and magazines, and in an interview given to Rio de Janeiro's Diario da Noitc, shortly after his arrival in Brazil, he claimed to be staying in the same room ('in a modest boarding house in Santa Teresa') in which Nijinsky had spent his honeymoon back in 1913 (Nijinsky had in fact lodged in Santa Teresa during his stay in Rio, but he and his bride stayed in the rather more upscale Hotel Internacional).24 The dancer is also quoted in the 1956 edition of Calicoes as stating: 'O meu grande amigo Antonio Boto e incomparavel como Poeta, mas, quando me diz os seus versos ainda e maior' [My good friend Antonio Boto is incomparable as a poet, but when he recites his verses for me he is greater still]. What is worth noting about this quote is its claim of close friendship — absent from most other fake encomiums recorded in Cati(dcs — as well as the motif of shared artistry of stagecraft: Nijinsky the charismatic dancer praises Botto as an equally charismatic performer of his poetry. Upon Nijinsky's death in 1950, Botto assembled a collection of press reports and obituaries, in Portuguese and in French; one of the articles mentioned that Nijinsky hati died unaccompanied in a London hospital, and Botto reflected upon this fact in a poem written on the back of the sheet to which the clipping is glued: Ningueni acompanhou Nijinski morto cm Londrcs mmi hospital. Sim: ningueni no funeral. E ainda bem. Ningueni. No niundo de hoje Quern e que o compreenderia na sua divma mascara fria? Sou \sic\ eu o acompanhei, Sou eu, o sou grande amigo, Em alma e de joelhos o beijei.""^ [No one was with Nijinsky when he died in a London hospital. That's right: no one at the funeral. No one. And that's just as well. In the world of today Who ever could understand him Under his divine cold mask? Only I accompanied him, Only I, his greatest friend, Kneeled down and kissed him in my soul.] The most intense imaginary relationship Botto created for himself was, however, not with Nijinsky but with Federico Garcia Lorca, and the most extensive commen- tary on that relationship is recorded in a lecture on the Spanish poet that Botto was scheduled to present at the Teatro Municipal in Sao Paulo in the fall of 1947. Although the event did not take place, much of the handwritten text of the lecture survives in the archive, narrating the story of the intimate friendship between the two poets. At one point Botto quotes from a letter in which Lorca advises him to disregard his critics: 'Men querido Antonio Botto: Deixa-os falar! ... Tu nao respondas. Faz como eu. Tambem tenho sido alvo de verdadeiros msultos. Tu bem Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness of Being 117 sabes que os teus ritmos de beleza original ... sao linguas de agua divina jorrando de unia fonte a beira de um caminho onde se passa de noite para irmos sem vergonha a essa Grecia imortal que e tua no pensamento e na emocao' [My dearest Antonio Botto: Let them speak! ... Don't answer. Do as I've done. I too have been a target of real insults. You know best that your rhythms of original beauty ... are splashes of divine water that issue from a spring at the side of the road where we walk by night to reach, without shame, that immortal Greece that is yours in thought and in feeling].-6 An extensive section of the lecture describes Lorca's visit with Botto in Lisbon, in the course of which the two spend much time wandering about the working-class neighbourhoods of Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto, listening to fado performances, but also run into Fernando Pessoa in Cafe da Arcada ('Pessoa disse alguns versos seus, mas Lorca nao os sentiu. Que eram duros e forcados' [Pessoa recited some of his poems, but Lorca did not feel them. They were hard and contrived]). In real life, back in 1923, Botto did send to Lorca a copy of the edition of CJari(dc.< issued by Pessoa's short-lived publishing house Olisipo, but it seems there was no follow-up: the only Portuguese correspondent featured in the index to Lorca's voluminous Epiitolavio Complete is Teixeira de Pascoaes, the recipient of one postcard and one brief letter (both from 1923), and the only mention of Botto is in a footnote, which quotes from a letter to Lorca by Pessoa's friend Adriano del Valle (also from 1923): 'Recibio usted un libro de Antonio Botto, poeta portugues?' [Have you received a book by Antonio Botto, a Portuguese poet?].-' The apparent one-sidedness of this contact was, however, no impediment to Botto, who years later went on to represent Lorca as both a chosen soul mate and his most eloquent and faithful correspondent: following his move to Brazil, he corresponded with Lorca's friend and editor Guillermo de Torre, who was then literary director of Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, offering for publication over two hundred letters from Lorca he claimed to have in his possession. At first cautiously enthusiastic, de Torre turned increasingly frosty and laconic in his replies to Botto, likely having realized that his correspondent was using the nonexistent letters as bait in order to interest de Torre in the publication of his own poems by the same house that had just released the first multi-volume edition of Lorca's Ohms completas."^ Another major theme in Botto's creation of his alternative-reality persona was the narrativization of his childhood and adolescence, which at the same time sought to preserve his credentials as the poet of the people, deeply familiar with Lisbon's bairros popularcs and their artistic culture, and strove to elevate him above the very real limitations of his working-class origins. While no firm evidence to this effect seems to exist, most sources claim that Botto's gradual rise to artistic prominence was facilitated by his becoming employed at a well-known bookstore where he met a number of writers who encouraged his talents. One of them was likely to be Guerra Junqueiro, whose probably apocryphal laudatory comments Botto went on to reprint in his books long after Junqueiro's death in 1923."y In a newspaper article published in 1953 in Brazil, Botto refrained what may have been his true recollection of meeting the older writer in a striking way.30 As the account goes, the eleven-year-old Botto was studying in England (British education being a recurrent element of his autobiographic fictions) and visiting Lisbon during a brief 118 Anna Klobucka vacation. Having wandered into the Bertrand bookstore in Chiado, the young Botto speaks in English to request a copy of Junqueiro's Patria and is approached by the writer himself who happens to be in the bookstore and is curious to know why a British boy should desire to buy a book 'que diz tanto mal da sua Gra-Bretanha' [that speaks so badly of your Great Britain]. Botto answers him 'num pessimo portugues, bastante esquecido em quatro anos de Inglaterra, lidando, apenas, com ingleses' [in very bad Portuguese, having forgotten to speak it in my four years in England, where I only dealt with English people]. As a result of their conversation, funqueiro signs the book for Botto, ends up paying for it, and insists that the boy should visit him at home. The conclusion of the story injects a distinct, and rather disconcerting, note into this account of the beginning of a friendship: 'Ao mesmo tempo, as nossas maos, envolvidas num aperto nervoso e profundo, disseram de parte a parte, sem palavras, o que uma crianca e urn homem talvez tivessem que dizer, mas sem que ninguem ouvisse' [At the same time, our hands, joined in a nervous and forceful grasp, told each other wordlessly what a child and a man might have to say, but without anyone overhearing]. I hope that my retelling of this story in the present context is not interpreted as aimed at casting Guerra Junqueiro in the role of a potential child molester. What it does illustrate rather aptly is, on the one hand, the transformative creativity of Botto's imagination, moulding his own life and self with materially concrete ingeniousness comparable to that his friend Pessoa channelled into the invention of his heteronyms. On the other hand, it illuminates the kind of environment that may have enabled Botto's ascent as the artist he went on to become, in which male homosociahty of intellectual dialogue taking place in bookstores and cafes went hand in hand with veiled but hardly invisible expression of male homoerotic desire. A number of texts in Botto's 'Caderno proibido' and elsewhere sketch out, in fact, what could be called an ethnography of same-sex relations m pre-World War II Lisbon, featuring, among others, the figure of a lower-class adolescent who is taken under the wing of an older and wealthier man, sometimes a respectable paterfamilias. It is impossible to ascertain whether this was Botto's own predicament, but he clearly shows himself to be familiar with — and highly sympathetic to — the practice of same-sex prostitution by young Portuguese males, as he launches on occasion into a heated defence of adolescents who trade sexual favours for a degree of economic security. This is what happens, for instance, in a long, rambling poem draft m which condemnation is diverted from the youngsters whom Botto describes as innocent victims of prejudice and toward those benefiting from the economic exploration of female prostitution, while also suggesting the social pervasiveness of homoerotic trade.3' In another poem, the same structure of contrastive judgement has the speaker himself occupy the place of the pure lovers who are situated in opposition to the beneficiaries of female prostitution: So me acusam de ser exagerado Quando entro no corpo que mc vein Ao meu encontro para ser beijado, E se gostei, amei porque fiz bem. For que razao eu sou caluniado Antonio Botto's Impossible Queerness of Being 119 For esses que nao gostam de ninguem E que vivem de andarem no mercado Das mulheres compradas e alugadas — Comercio que repugna a quern nao o tern?3" [If I'm accused of being excessive When I enter a body that comes my way To meet me and to be kissed, And if I liked and loved because what I did was right, Why am I being vilified By those who do not like anyone And who live off the market Of women bought and rented — Trade that disgusts whoever takes no part?] Patent in both his published and unpublished works, Botto's genius — and I use the word without irony — consisted in his ability precisely not to transcend but to transform himself, while forging unprecedented conditions of speakability for same- sex erotic and social expression in modern Portuguese literature and culture. Notes to Chapter 7 1. Following his emigration to Brazil in 1947, Botto began to spell his last name as 'Boto' in all publications and manuscripts. I am following currently prevailing Portuguese usage m retaining the spelling associated with the two and a half decades of his most prolific and acclaimed literary activity as a public figure in Portugal. 2. For a commentary on Pessoa's writings on Botto, see Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality, ed. by Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 14—16. Other leading modernist figures who wrote about Botto include Antonio Ferro, Jose Regio andjoiio Caspar Simdes. See the anthology of critical comments by these and other writers in Antonio Botto ^97-/959 (Lisbon: Bibhoteca Nacional, 1999), pp. 41—78. 3. Joaquim Manuel Magalhaes 'Antonio Botto', in llin Poitco da Morte (Lisbon: Presenca, 1989), pp. 17—20. The most comprehensive critical assessment of Botto's homotextual poetics is an essay by Carlos Manuel Callon Torres, 'Notas para a re-leitura dum maldito: a cultura homossexual nAs Cau(des de Antonio Botto', Eusorama, 47—48 (October 2001), pp. 59—78. 4. On male and female homosexuality 111 Medieval Calician-Portuguese lyric, see Josiah Blackmore, 'The Poets of Sodom', in Queer Iberia: Sexuality, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. by Josiah Blackmore and Oregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 195—221. The foundational status of A Confissao de Eucio with regard to the 'contemporary Portuguese homosexual canon' is stressed by Eduardo Pitta in his (likewise seminal) essay Eractura: A coudicao homossexual ua literatlira portuguesa contemporduea (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2003), p. 12. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Portuguese are mine. 5. "We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized — Westphal's famous article of 1870 can stand as its date of birth — less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility ... a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.' Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction, trans, by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43. 6. My experience (in a class on 'Cender and Sexuality in Lusophone Literatures' taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the spring of 2009). 7. Mario de Sa-Carneiro, A Confissao de Eucio (Lisbon: Atica, 1973), p. 154. 8. Regarding the unspeakability of same-sex love (known for centuries as amor nejando) in Portuguese, the first comprehensive dictionary of the language, Raphael Bluteau's Vocabulario 120 Anna Klobucka Portngue: e Latino (1712—1728), offers an unsurpassably expressive illustration: it defines 'netando' as 'cousa indigna de se expnmir com palavras: cousa da qual nao se pode hilar sem vergonha' [a thing unworthy of being expressed m words: a thing that cannot be spoken about without shame] and 'peccado netando' |nefarious sin] as 'o de sodomia' (the one of sodomy); the entry on 'sodomia', in turn, conclusively forecloses any discursive articulation by defining sodomy as 'peccado, por antonomasia, netando, & por consequencia indigno de definicao da sua torpeza' [nefarious sin, by antonomasia, and consequently unworthy of a definition of its turpitude|. The dictionary may be consulted in digital form on the site of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de Sao Paulo (http://www.ieb.usp.br/onhne/mdex.asp). 9. These verses belong in a long, unfinished poem, written in 1919 and published tor the first time, in its original Portuguese and in English translation, by Richard Zenith in 'Fernando Pessoa's (Jay Heteronym?', in Lnsoscx: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. by Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 47-53- 10. Antonio Botto, (Jaii(des e Outros Poenias, ed. by Eduardo Pitta (Vila Nova de Famalicao: Quasi, 2008), p. 100. English translation by Fernando Pessoa in Antonio Botto, Songs (194S), p. 85. While any extended consideration of Pessoa's role as the translator of Botto's poetry is beyond the scope of this essay, his insertion, in the poem's first stanza, of the curious qualifier 'in straying words' (absent in the original Portuguese) is worth highlighting in the present context. 11. Jose Regio, A I cilia Casa, IV: lidas Sao Vidas (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda, 2003), p. 125. 12. Regie, Vidas Sao I Idas, p. 120. 13. Luiz Pedro Moitinho de Almeida, 'Antonio Botto', Jonial dos Poctas e Troi'adores 2, 14 (March 19S2), 10-15 (P- '-)• 14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Hpisfeuiology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 242. 15. At the same time, it is crucial to take under advisement, in this context, Sedgwick's caveat regarding 'our own empowering effort to recontront the two closets with each other as symmetrical objects ot our own analysis': 'How tar, in developing such an account, are we drawing our own surplus value of interpretive energies from the homophobic commonplace that attributes the enforcement of heterosexist norms to, precisely and double-damningly, the closeted homosexual himself?' Ibid., p. 242. 16. The third infraction was disobeying an order issued by Botto's superior. Interestingly, the dispatch orders also the dismissal of three female employees ot the same government office (O'ria Rosa, Maria da Nazare Freire, and Deolinda Augusta Calvao), all ot whom are said to have demonstrated the lack ot 'moral reliability necessary for the exercise ot their functions'. Diario do Gouemo, 2nd series, 2O2 (9 de Novembro de 1942). p. 5795. 17. Joao Caspar Simoes, Retratos de Poctas que Gonhcci (Porto: Brasilia, 1974), p. 168. 18. Maria da Conceicao Fernandes, Antonio Botto: uni pacta de Lishoa (Lisbon: Minerva, 1998), p. 49. 19. See, for example, Luis Amaro. 'Nora de Abertura', in Antonio Botto 1897—11)59, pp. 33-37. 20. Botto's working-class family moved to Lisbon from the rural province ot Ribatejo when he- was a child. While it is not known whether he received any formal education at all, the fact th.it he remained more or less poor throughout his life is well attested to in contemporary and posthumous testimonials (notwithstanding occasional episodes ot showy magnificence, such as his voyage to Naples in a first-class cabin of the steamer Martha Washington, as a companion of the prince Don Luis Fernando de Orleans y Borbon, documentation of which survives 111 Botto's archive at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon). 21. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 'Boto: Um Principe' (a newspaper article clipped from an unknown source; see Botto's archive, BNP/E12, 3536). 22. It is unclear whether Botto had Songs printed in Portugal or in Brazil. Eduardo Pitta states that all of Botto's books were published in Portugal (Botto, Can(dcs, p. 21), but a marketing flyer preserved in the writer's archive suggests Songs may have been printed in Sao Paulo. BNP/E12, 228 ('Fragmentos de Poesia'). 23. Antonio Botto, As C^au(des de Antonio Boto [sie\ (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1956), p. 450. 24. Diario da Noite, 4 September 1947. BNP/E12, 898-950 ('Recortes de Imprensa'). Antonio Bono's Impossible Queerness of Being tii 25. BNIVE12, 2092-2413 ('Tenuis Varios'). 26. BNIVE12, 172 ('Garcia Lorca'). 27. Federico Garcia Lorca, Epistolario Complete. Libro I (igw—iQ26), ed. by Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Catedra, 1997), p. 194 note 563. Pessoa and del Valle comment on the books sent to twenty-one Spanish recipients (using addresses supplied by del Valle) in the letters they exchange between August and October 1923. Fernando Pessoa, Corrcspoudaicio ig2j-~igj_s, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assirio & Alvinu 1999), pp. 20, 368—69. Pessoa's archive at the Portuguese Biblioteca Nacional contains a handwritten list of twenty-one names of Spanish intellectuals, including Lorca, under the heading 'Notas para numdar libros a Esparia' (Notes for sending books to Spain). Catalogue number BNP/E3, 133C-3 and 3a. 28. Botto's archive, BNP/E12, 809-1 1 ('Cartas de Cuillermo de Torre'). 29. Amaro, 'Nota de Abertura', p. 34. 30. 'Intimidade com Guerra (unqueiro', published in an unidentified Brazilian newspaper in late 1953, under the rubric 'Antonio Boto aos domingos'. BNP/E12, 898—950. 31. BNP/E12, 13 ('Caderno Proibido'). 32. BNP/E12, 109 ('Poesias Dispersas VII').