A fragment of Autobiography

By Selma Carvalho

On October 9, 2014, at a Dominic Winter auction, a Goan antiquarian made quiet history; not the sort which is immediately celebrated but whose significance grows with time, and will become particularly relevant when Goa decides to honour its greatest modernist artist with a museum. He purchased Souza’s original typed notes and two accompanying drawings, which were eventually published as Words and Lines (A Fragment of Autobiography)by Villiers Publications (1959).

The dribs and drabs which exist as commentary on Souza’s life is lamentable. Even more lamentable, is that ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, is almost always taken as the starting point when reconstructing Souza. Autobiographical content is prone to all the licenses one takes, when writing about oneself and, a critical analysis, is essential when trying to make sense of an artist’s life.

On April 12, 1924, a smallish house on the hillocks between Arrarim and Sonarbhat of Saligao, groaned with the misery of Lilia-Maria’s birth pangs, and peeking his head into the world was Francis Newton Souza. Lilia-Maria Cecilia Antunes came from a family hovering between poverty and aspiration. Her mother, Leopoldinha Saldanha, widowed, took in lodgers, and one of her lodgers was Jose Victor Piedade de Souza, teaching at the nearby Mater Dei school.

Jose and Lilia, or Lily as she was known, became lovers, and possibly this had much to do with caste inhibitions, they became star-crossed lovers. In the early months of 1922, a twenty-three year old Jose and a nineteen year old Lilia got married.  Thanks to Souza’s biography, we remember his father’s family only as ‘chronic drunkards.’ Drunk or not, his grandfatherAntonio de Souza was a man of considerable merit. Originally from Siolim, he was the principal of a small school in Assolna, set up in 1893, by the Sociedade da Benevolencia e Instrucao.

Why had Souza condemned his grandparents as drunkards? Even before a close member of Souza’s family confirmed an estrangement between Lily and her husband’s family, it becomes fairly obvious upon examining Souza’s birth records. When on May 8, 1924, the family assembled at the Saligao Church, just as they had done fourteen months earlier for their daughter Zumera’s christening, what was glaringly noticeable was the absence of the Souza family. Not a single Souza is named godparent for either child. F N Souza’s maternal grandmother, Leopoldinha Saldanha, became his godmother.

According to Souza, his father died three months after his birth and his mother plunged into unimaginable despair when her eldest daughter, Zumera also died, a year later. ‘My mother, my grandmother, my aunts and all my relatives mourned bitterly,’ he wrote, and morbidly wished it was the boy, who had died instead. It is highly unlikely, in a Goan household, that they wished in earnest for the boy to have died, but his father’s death did have a detrimental effect on his mother; it left her destitute. The absence of a male figure gave rise to a complex relationship with his mother, which he raised to a form of divinity, alluding to it bordering on the unseemly. In the poem, ‘Mother of God’, he reflects on the relationship, writing ‘My body and mind took the shape of divinity but my act differed from the Mother-fucker Oedipus.’ Tragic loss of spouse replaced by a son, is a familiar mythological theme: the new replacing the old, winter and spring, death and resurrection, and Souza, a new comer to 1950s bohemian London, was in the business of creating myths.

Souza only hints at the abundance of women in childhood. Just how crowded had his life had been in those years? There was his uncle Cyril, studying to be a stenographer, but it was the women who loomed large; mother, grandmother (a fairly tall woman of ‘easy going’ disposition) and three aunts -Blanche, Matti and Bridgit. Elsewhere, Souza shows his frustration with this gaggle of women, when he writes, ‘there was nothing for me to do even among the women in Goa.’

‘Shortly after my sister’s death, I had a severe attack of smallpox,’ Souza wrote. This attack would give rise to the charming but entirely apocryphal story surrounding his name. The story goes that in childhood, a bout of smallpox nearly killed Souza, and his mother having propitiated St. Francis Xavier’s goodwill in saving her child, added Francis to his name. There is little doubt that the poxscarred him, as years later, he would sketch a self-portrait depicting those hollow pox marks as tiny crosses. But the name, Francisco was already on Souza’s baptismal records just days after his birth. It runs in the family, as in his paternal grandfather’s name, Antonio Francisco de Souza.

To his credit, Souza tried to set the record straight in a 1994 interview with his then mistress Srimati Lal, admitting that Francis was always on his birth certificate, but by then the public had become so enamoured with the almost biblical image of a desperate child, clinging to his mother, saved by divine intervention, that this clarification gained little traction. Souza went to his grave with the story intact. Christopher Wood wrote an eulogy in the Guardian insisting that it was smallpox which earned Souza the name of Goa’s most revered saint. (ENDS)


Source: The Goan, Published November 22, 2014