The Relic
by Eça de Queirós, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Original title: A Relíquia
Original language: Portuguese
| Country: Portugal |
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| Published by Dedalus, Limited | | Pub. Date: November 4, 2002 | | Pub. Place: UK | | Format: Paperback, 288 pages | | Dimensions: (in inches): 7.80 x 0.97 x 5.02 | | ISBN: 0946626944 | | Edition: Reprint | | List Price: $14.99, £9.99 | | Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.99 |
| Published by Hippocrene Books | | Pub. Date: April 1995 | | Pub. Place: USA | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 0781803462 | | List Price: $16.95 | | Not available for ordering |
| Published by Dedalus | | Pub. Date: 1994 | | Pub. Place: UK | | List Price: £8.99 | | Not available for ordering |
| ![[front cover]](/img/covers/0946626944_m.gif)
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The Relic (1887) is one long romp through a world polarised by piety and debauchery, Lisbon’s credulity and decadence, Egypt’s old stones and fleshpots, Palestine’s corrupt nostalgia and — jumping 1800 years — ‘one day in the month of Nisan, when Pontius Pilate was the procurator of Judaea’! It is also a hard look at religion and hypocrisy, love and lust, truth and the fateful lie. It was a risk: like The Mandarin it released Eça from realism’s shackles but didn’t endear him to Catholic critics.
It may have been timely for him. Its writing coincided with his marriage, at forty, and drew on the travels of his twenties with his wife’s brother to Egypt and the Near East. Fantasy was another satirical edge with which to flay society; Eça’s sensual writing may have been compensation for his colluding with it.
Wealthy, devout, puritanical Aunt Patrocínio’s adoption of the young Teodorico costs the boy dear.
‘Eyes lowered I would say the creed and list the Ten Commandments, all the time aware of the smell she gave off, the bittersweet odour of snuff and formic acid.’
As a graduate, the brief moments he steals away from the stifling religiose home, the prison he must still endure for his inheritance’s sake, are given over to real devotion.
‘Trembling, I knelt down on the rug and pressed my chest against her knees, offering myself up to her like a mere beast. She opened wide her shawl and mercifully took me in.’
She, this time, is Amelia, an energetic lover who soon cools and teaches Teodorico, not for the last time, about betrayal. He too refines duplicity; his aunt’s commission to visit
Jerusalem to acquire a healing relic grants him freedom at last, and scope for indulgence, such as Mary from Yorkshire who gives ‘her brave little Portuguese lover’ her nightdress in Alexandria, while his companion, the German scholar Topsius, is a suitably didactic foil in the holy places and whore houses of Palestine. Teodorico obtains a branch of thorns that are plaited up into a crown.
Then he and Topsius awake, transported back in time, and set off for Jerusalem on the eve of Passover:
‘The whole city was bathed in sumptuous light... And within the wall, facing the cedar trees that shaded us, stood the Temple, proud and splendid... Walled in by polished granite, protected by ramparts of marble, it looked like the shining citadel of a god!’
In his holy delirium, Teodorico meets Pharisees and
prostitutes, Saducees and soothsayers, Essenes and Jesus
himself; a portrait of a society painted with sensuous
precision. He hears Pilate’s question, ‘What is the truth?’; he sees the crucifixion, and the grave from which the still–living Jesus is smuggled. The empty tomb is the big lie upon which Christendom is founded.
Back in his own century, he approaches another Jerusalem:
‘Trembling, I galloped forward. And I saw the city below me... sombre, packed with monasteries and crouched behind its crumbling walls, like a poor, flea–ridden woman who crawls into a corner to die, wrapped in the ragged remnants of her cloak.’
After many adventures he returns to his aunt, loaded with relics, longing for her death and his inheritance. The tale
unwinds with a kind of recalcitrant logic. Of course the
parcels — crown of thorns and nightdress reeking of sin — get swapped; plot and moral creak alarmingly as they work
themselves out, but this book has so many unexpected
delights that perhaps it doesn’t matter whether Eça earns or gives the lie to his final paragraph; ‘...I had lost it all...because for one moment, I lacked the ‘shameless heroism needed to tell a lie’, which thanks to some universal illusion, is responsible for creating all sciences and all religions, whether it loudly strides the earth or merely lifts its eyes palely to Heaven.’
‘He gave us two ears of corn and, following behind him, our Gentile feet entered the forbidden courtyard of Judah.
Walking by my side, Eliezer of Silo, courteous and gentle, asked me if my country lay far off and if its roads were dangerous.
I mumbled something vague, evasive:
‘Yes. We’ve just arrived from Jericho.’
‘Has the balsam harvest been good there?’
‘Wonderful!’ I assured him ardently. ‘Blessed be the Eternal One, for in this year of His grace, we’re up to our eyes in balsam!’
He seemed pleased. He told me then he was one of the doctors who live in the Temple, since the priests and those who perform the sacrifices suffer continually from ‘intestinal disorders’, because they’re always walking about, sweating and barefoot, on the cold flagstones of the courtyards.
‘That’s why’, he murmured, his kind eyes glinting playfully, ‘the people in Zion call us ‘gut doctors’!’ ‘I bent double with laughter and pleasure at that joke whispered to me in the austere dwelling place of the Eternal One. Then, recalling my own intestinal disorders in Jericho, provoked by my passion for the divine but treacherous melons of Syria, I asked the amiable physician if in these circumstances he would prescribe bismuth.
The learned man cautiously shook his woollen mitre. Then, raising one finger in the air, he entrusted me with this incomparable remedy:
‘Take glue from Alexandria, saffron from the garden, an onion from Persia and dark wine from Emmaus, mix it all up, then boil it. Leave it to cool in a silver vase and place it at a crossroads at sunrise....’ pp186-7
