Cousin Bazilio     by Eça de Queirós, Translated by Roy Campbell Original title: O Primo Bazilio Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £9.00 Not available for ordering Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover List Price: £14.95 Not available for ordering

Cousin Bazilio is one of Eça’s greatest works, his Madame Bovary. It’s a fairly long book one is forced to read slowly because the writing is so replete with poetic genius and Eça is always inventive enough to tackle a hackneyed image and —re-cast it freshly and movingly; ‘Her golden hair, still burnished by the warmth of the pillow’.

The novel is set amidst a stifling coterie of Lisbonites in cozy government jobs and Eça has good fun with several hilariously pompous minor characters, such as the Counsellor, who talks about a rural province with a lot of pigsties as having ‘great porcine wealth’, while a minor female character, Aunty Victoria, finds her favourite nourishment in ‘catarrh pastilles’.

Throughout the novel a great contrast is made between the two main female characters, the sensual, romantic Luiza, who falls for a wealthy cad — her cousin Bazilio — and Luiza’s servant, the scrawny, embittered (and virginal) Juliana. The heights of Luiza’s sensual abandon in her illegitimate affair, the lush evocation of her lively, rosy body, her delighted playfulness with Bazilio are all subject to the constant counterpoint of Juliana’s scorn, her moral scorn and the unwitting scorn of the comparison with her ill-favoured body and existence as Luiza’s undernourished, ailing servant. Eça creates in this contrast an exquisite amalgam of social critique, sexual fire and psychological truth.

The sensuality of Eça’s prose, translated with a certain swing by the South African poet Roy Campbell, has to be read to be believed, Luiza preparing to sink into adultery is described promenading; ‘the lassitude of her gait broke her waist-line in a languorous and promising manner’ and later Bazilio discovers ‘a delicious turbulence in her gesture and looks’. Eça could manage something lacking in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, — enjoy and celebrate his female characters, revel in and share their femininity and sexual grace even while revealing their snobbery and naiveté.

Something else he seems to reveal, as in another of his great sexy novels The Sin of Father Amaro, is the frustrated condition of fin-de-siècle womanhood which made them prone apparently to overblown romantic emotions and eventual ‘moral downfall’.

One of the fascinations of this book is to ask where exactly Eça’s sympathies lie. Cousin Bazilio is a radically strange drama of married morality where the author takes all sides, of the cheating wife and the doting husband and the blackmailing but oppressed servant and the protective friend — all sides except that of caddish Bazilio. Perhaps he didn’t want to arrive at a final moral standpoint and avoids the issue by rapidly coming to a contrived ending which has shades of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

‘Afterwards came to her mind all the classical episodes of Lisbonese love-affairs which had blossomed in Cintra; the walks by moonlight at Sitiais, taken slowly, with long hushed rests on the Penedo da Saudade, looking over the valley, with the sands in the distance, full of a nostalgic, idealistic, pale lustre; warm siestas in the shade of the Green Peak, hearing the fresh dripping murmur of water falling from boulder to boulder: afternoons in the fields of Collares, rowing an old boat on the dark water in the shade of the ash trees — and what laughter, when they were going to moor in the tall reeds, and her straw hat got caught in the lower branches of the poplars!

She had always loved Cintra. As soon as she entered the dark and murmurous groves of the Ramalhão she felt a sweet, happy melancholy.’ pp12-13