Eça de Queirós: “Well, here comes the Hachisch!”

At the end of October 1869, Eça de Queirós, then 23 years old, left with a friend, the Count of Redondo, for a trip to Egypt and Palestine. As for Egypt, the future novelist recorded his impressions in notes (posthumously collected in a volume entitled O Egipto: Notas de Viagem), whose reading makes it clear that the two young Portuguese men were determined to take advantage of the occasion to try hashish, which in The XNUMXth century embodied much of the fascination exercised by the exotic Orient — and, in Portugal, few would be as aware as Eça das loas, who in France sang to the “artificial paradises” his idols Gautier, Baudelaire and de Nerval, notorious members of the “Club des Haschischins”.

So, in O Egypt, when reporting a visit to Cairo's bazaars, in the company of Redondo and a local guide, Eça de Queirós writes bluntly:

We went only once to the drug bazaar: we were looking for hashish.

— Hachisch? — Jonas Ali [the guide] told us — but it is forbidden!*

— But there must be it... above youof being banned!

— In the first place,” he replied gravely, “there are three qualities of hashish: there hashish in tablets…

"Then come the pills!"

— There hashish in cake…

"Then come the cakes!"

- There is hashish in jelly…

"Then come the jelly!"

Jonas Ali shrugged his shoulders — and the look he gave us was full of infinite disdain…

in O Egypt, Eça does not mention hashish again; but he recounts how, during his stay in Cairo, he participated with Redondo in two hookah smoking sessions, the effect of which, he explains, is to plunge the consumer “into that state the Arabs call 'kiéf. “[O]n brain, empty of ideas and full of dreams, we were immersed for a long time in that sweet rapture, in the kief — in the divine, soft, voluptuous, inert, peaceful kief!”, writes Eça, who also mentions “visions in which we thought we were Caliphs, eating admirable delicacies between the dances of slaves”.

Although Eça de Queirós does not explain what substance he smoked in the hookah, it was obviously a kif, the dried inflorescences of cannabis. As the least potent of the psychoactive cannabis preparations, kif it was not banned in Egypt along with hashish, which is why Eça was able to calmly initiate himself into altered states of consciousness in public places in Cairo.

Certain doubts regarding the continuation of this story are clarified by the writer Jaime Batalha Reis, a friend of Eça de Queirós, in the introduction he wrote in 1903 to the work of this Barbarian Prose:

In the spring of [1870], we were one afternoon — Antero de Quental and I — in the house we then inhabited at S. Pedro de Alcântara when Eça de Queiroz came in, recently arrived from the East, but which we had not yet seen”. And, continues Batalha Reis, when bringing his friends up to date on the trip, Eça “(a)analyzed, in detail, the sensations that the use of the haschisch, and the fantastic visions he prepared for us — because he and the Count of Redondo had brought us hashish mixed with jam, cakes, and pastilles that were smoked in special pipes”.

In summary: not only did Eça de Queirós and the Count of Redondo satisfy in Cairo the desire to try hashish, but they were also enthusiastic about thesulted to the point of assuming the moral and material responsibility of “illuminating” the intellectual circle they frequented with cannabis — which, it should be noted, would go down in history as the golden generation of Portuguese literature.

With the revelation of the facet haschaschin of Eça de Queirós, the ball is surely in the court of those who consider that the appetite for altered states of consciousness such as those provided by cannabis deserves imprisonment or, more civilly, the intervention of a Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction.

This text was originally published in the Portuguese edition of the book “O Rei vai nú”, by Jack Herer, and reproduced in #3 of Cannadouro Magazine.