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joanne burns

photography

(A memoir of Portugal, 1971, from the collection penelope’s knees)

This piece draws on memories of a period in 1971, when I was living and writing [1] in a small house on the rural outskirts of Foz do Arelho, a coastal fishing village, close to Caldas da Rainha, north of Lisbon.

they rented the small house next to the pine forest for three months, from the peasant farmers. it had been the home of a daughter who had gone to canada in search of prosperity.

Photo of joanne burns taken at the house referred to in this memoir, by Harry Lourandos and Jacques Bierling.

they came there to write and to paint. to become delirious with their own words. their fabulations, the novelty of their inhalations: rural life in a foreign land. they re-ordered the interiors of the house; dismantled the double bed. they were travellers there were three of them. they preferred the contrast of their soft sleeping bags with the hard floorboards. they took the portraits of the sacred heart and the virgin off the walls and stacked them in the wardrobe. they lifted the bed base and carried it to a tiny room adjacent to the barn ramshackled  to the rear of the house. a broad window space conjoined these two sections, the barn with its deep earth floor its moist subterranean odour, and the dark chambers of the tiny room where the air spun round in near audible whirrings, thick with psychic breath.

they would enter this room individually at various times of the day and surrender to the thick embraces of sleep their dreams swollen with fire flesh water and sky and endless longings. entering the room was like descending into a secret at the centre of a universe, swathed by the ancient smells of hay and dung floating up from the barn.

each day they would sit in the sun on the chairs brought from inside and brush their hair and clean their teeth and read novels and write letters and postcards and stare at the well, feeling the force of its deep tunnel its dark gravity pulling at them. and they would take photos of each other sitting on its edge, letting the bucket down and down, exhilarating themselves with the images their cameras were framing. they took photos of the row of pumpkins, melons placed by their neighbours on the low wall between the two dwellings and watched them as they let their donkeys drink the well water straight from the bucket with its dripping rope. they mildly sensed their neighbours’ dislike of them. the anglaises and their immorality. two men one woman. who would believe they were an engaged couple and a cousin.

the days leaked into weeks. time dissolved. the windmill the ocean the bright pastel houses the market place the pottery the wine the cognac the corn bread the fresh fish. endless conversations interpretations hilarity intensity. pleasure embraced them like a warm pelt. and the hum of the wooden interiors coaxed them into resurrecting old memories, earlier selves that now filled the room with palpable presence. it seemed a time of rare simultaneity, of luxury, a zone where present past and future were irrelevant words. and the bare room where they slept at night, their clothes draped over the empty bed frame leaning high against the wall seemed to them like a mountain sanctuary where sleep blessed them with any sensation they desired.

for some time the prevalence of these intoxications prevented them from acknowledging the basis of the rotting odour that lingered around their windows on many mornings. when eventually they discovered its source — from the rabbit skins thrown over the wall into the long grass of their front garden by their neighbours —  they were obliged to confront the quiet atmosphere of hostility rising around them. and when the city conscripts their visiting friends brought sang protest songs about the fascist government and the war in africa with passion into the silence of the evenings in their living room they imagined police coming to arrest them for stirring up trouble, for political interference.

as autumn advanced with its ribbon of gentle chill they tightened their stomachs their hearts their intentions. everywhere they went, to the village the ocean to the fresh water stream through the fields they felt outcasts, intruders. eyes stared out at them like grave stones. they lost their naivete they had to realise their foreignness. there were strange footsteps round the back of the house in daylight. suspicion began to stick to them like fear. they carried it home from the shopping in their straw and canvas bags. the love the pleasure in the house burst slowly, quietly deflating like withering balloons.

and so they reassembled the house, rebuilding the double bed, rehanging the framed dark icons on the walls. the house became stiff, rigid. its emptiness grew fierce. as if punishing them for daring to alter the nature of things. they packed their poems stories paintings into their bulging backpacks and baskets, left the keys under the appointed brick near the well and hurried as soon as they could with the weight of their packs on their shoulders to the bus station. silently, sadly. on the verge of  regret.

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