The Book of Disquiet (26 page)

178

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched around in our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.

The relation that exists between sleep and life is the same that exists between what we call life and what we call death. We’re sleeping, and this life is a dream, not in a metaphorical or poetic sense, but in a very real sense.

Everything in our activities that we hold to be superior participates in death and is death. What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life? A statue is a dead body, chiselled to capture death in incorruptible matter. Pleasure itself, which seems to be an immersion in life, is in fact an immersion in ourselves, a destruction of the relations between us and life, an excited shadow of death.

The very act of living means dying, since with each day we live, we have one less day of life remaining.

We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.

Never finding God, and never even knowing if God exists! Passing
from world to world, from incarnation to incarnation, forever coddled by illusion, forever caressed by error…

Never arriving at Truth, and never resting! Never reaching union with God! Never completely at peace but always with a hint of peace, always with a longing for it!

179

There’s a childish instinct in humanity that makes the proudest among us, if he’s a man and not crazy, long – Blessed Father! – for the paternal hand that would guide us, in whatever shape or form as long as it guides us, through the world’s mystery and confusion. Each of us is a speck of dust that the wind of life lifts up and then drops. We have to depend on a stronger force, to place our small hand in another hand, for today is always uncertain, the sky always far, and life always alien.

Those of us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of how uncertain and empty everything is.

Perhaps we’re guided by an illusion; we’re surely not guided by consciousness.

180

If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and don’t publish at all. I’ll miss it not only because it will be a life, however mediocre, that I’ll never have again, but also because every sort of life has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up another life, even a better one, that particular pleasure isn’t as good, that special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there’s something missing.

If one day I succeed in carrying the cross of my intention to the good Calvary, I’ll find another calvary on that good Calvary, and I’ll miss
the time when I was futile, mediocre and imperfect. I will in some sense be less.

I’m tired. I had a long day full of idiotic work in this almost deserted office. Two employees are out sick and the others aren’t here. I’m alone, except for the office boy in the back. I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly.

I’m tempted to ask whatever gods there be to keep me here, as if in a strong-box, safe from life’s sorrows as well as its joys.

181

In the faint shadows cast by the last light before evening gives way to night, I like to roam unthinkingly through what the city is changing into, and I walk as if nothing had a cure. I carry with me a vague sadness that’s pleasant to my imagination, less so to my senses. As my feet wander I inwardly skim, without reading, a book of text interspersed with swift images, from which I leisurely form an idea that’s never completed.

There are those who read as swiftly as they see, and they finish without having taken it all in. So I, from the book skimmed in my soul, glean a hazy story, remembrances of another wanderer, snatches of descriptions of twilights or moonlights, with garden paths in the middle, and various silk figures passing by, passing by…

I don’t discriminate between one and another tedium. I move along in the street, in the evening and in my dreamed reading all at the same time, and the roads are really travelled. I emigrate and rest, as if aboard a ship that’s already on the high sea.

Suddenly the dead street lamps light up in unison on the two extensions of the long curved street. My sadness increases, as if with a thud. The book has finished. In the viscous air of the abstract street there is only an external thread of feeling, like the slobber of an idiot Destiny, dripping on my soul’s consciousness.

Another life, of the city at nightfall. Another soul, of one who watches the night. I walk uncertainly and allegorically, unreally sentient. I’m like a story that someone told, and so well was it told that I
took on just a hint of flesh at the beginning of one of the chapters of this novel that’s the world: ‘At that moment a man could be seen walking slowly down So-and-so Street.’

What do I have to do with life?

182

I
NTERLUDE

I bowed out of life before it began, for not even in dreams did I find it attractive. Dreams themselves wearied me, and this brought me a false, external sensation, as of having come to the end of an infinite road. I overflowed from myself to end up I don’t know where, and that’s where I’ve uselessly stagnated. I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

I observe myself. I’m my own spectator. My sensations pass, like external things, before I don’t know what gaze of mine. I bore myself no matter what I do. All things, down to their roots in mystery, have the colour of my boredom.

The flowers Time gave me were already wilted. The only thing I can do is pluck their petals slowly. And this is so fraught with old age!

The slightest action weighs on me like a heroic deed. The mere idea of a gesture wearies me, as if it were something I actually thought of doing.

I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being.

What would be ideal is to have no more action than the false action of a fountain – to go up so as to fall down in the same place, pointlessly shimmering in the sun and making sound in the silence of the night so that whoever dreams would think of rivers in his dream and smile forgetfully.

183

Since the dull beginning of the hot, deceitful day, dark clouds with jagged edges had been ranging over the oppressed city. Towards the estuary they were grimly piled one on top the other, and as they spread, so did a forewarning of tragedy, in the streets’ vague rancour against the altered sun.

At midday, when we left for lunch, a dire expectation hung in the pallid atmosphere. Shreds of tattered clouds were growing blacker in the foreground. Towards the Castle the sky was clear but with something ominous in its blue. The sun was out but it wasn’t enticing.

When we returned to the office, at half-past one, the sky seemed clearer, but only over one of the older parts of town, towards the estuary, where there was indeed more visibility. On the city’s northern side, the clouds slowly coalesced into just one cloud, black and implacable, creeping forward with blunted grey-white claws at the ends of its black arms. Soon it would reach the sun, and the usual city noises seemed to hush, as if waiting. Towards the east the sky was somewhat clearer, or seemed so, but the heat had become even more unpleasant. We sweated in the shadows of the large office. ‘A huge thunderstorm is on its way,’ said Moreira, and he turned the page of the ledger.

By three o’clock the sun had ceased being functional. It was necessary to switch on the lights (which was depressing, for it was summer), first at the back of the office, where goods were being wrapped for shipping, and then in the middle, where it was getting hard to fill out the delivery notes and to mark down the numbers of the railroad vouchers. Finally, close to four o’clock, even those of us privileged to have windows could no longer see well enough to work. The whole office was electrically lit up. Senhor Vasques threw open the door to his private office and said, ‘Moreira, I was supposed to go to Benfica,* but there’s no way – it’s going to pour.’ ‘And it’s coming from that direction,’ answered Moreira, who lived near the Avenida.* The noises from the street, suddenly loud and clear, were somewhat altered. And I don’t know why, but the bells from the trams one block over sounded sad.

184

Before summer ends and autumn arrives, in the warm interim when the air weighs heavy and the colours dim, the late afternoons wear an almost tangible robe of imitation glory. They’re comparable to those tricks of the imagination, when it makes nostalgia out of nothing, and they go on indefinitely, like the wakes of ships that form never-ending snakes.

These late afternoons fill me, like a sea at high tide, with a feeling worse than tedium but for which there’s no other name. It’s a feeling of desolation I’m unable to pinpoint, a shipwreck of my entire soul. I feel as if I’d lost a benevolent God, as if the Substance of everything had died. And the physical universe is like a corpse that I loved when it was life, but it has all dissolved to nothing in the still warm light of the last coloured clouds.

My tedium takes on an air of horror, and my boredom is a fear. My sweat isn’t cold, but my awareness of it is. I’m not physically ill, but my soul’s anxiety is so intense that it passes through my pores and chills my body.

So great is this tedium, so sovereign my horror of being alive, that I can’t conceive of anything that might serve as a palliative, antidote, balsam or distraction for it. Sleeping horrifies me the way everything does. Dying is as horrifying as everything else. Going and stopping are the same impossible thing. Hope and doubt are equally cold and grey. I’m a shelf of empty jars.

And yet what nostalgia for the future* if I let my ordinary eyes receive the dead salutation of the declining day! How grand is hope’s burial, advancing in the still golden hush of the stagnant skies! What a procession of voids and nothings extends over the reddish blue that will pale in the vast expanses of crystalline space!

I don’t know what I want or don’t want. I’ve stopped wanting, stopped knowing how to want, stopped knowing the emotions or thoughts by which people generally recognize that they want something or want to want it. I don’t know who I am or what I am. Like someone buried under a collapsed wall, I lie under the toppled vacuity of the entire universe. And so I go on, in the wake of myself, until the
night sets in and a little of the comfort of being different wafts, like a breeze, over my incipient self-unawareness.*

Ah, the high and larger moon of these placid nights, torpid with anguish and disquiet! Sinister peace of the heavens’ beauty, cold irony of the warm air, blue blackness misted by moonlight and reticent to reveal stars.

185

I
NTERLUDE

This dreadful hour when I shrink to being possible or rise to mortality.

If only the morning wouldn’t dawn. If only I and this alcove and its interior atmosphere where I belong could all be spiritualized into Night, absolutized into Darkness, so that not so much as a shadow of me would remain that could taint, with my memory, whatever lived on.

186

Would to the gods, sad heart of mine, that Fate had a meaning! Would to Fate, rather, that the gods had one!

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Here lies my life. Nothing in me disturbs a thing.

187

My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate. I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out. But my real life couldn’t be more banal and contemptible,
and my dream life couldn’t be more constant and intense. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during siesta – two degradations in one body.

Yes, I distinctly see – with the clarity of reason when it flashes in the blackness of life and isolates the objects around us that make it up – all that is shoddy, worn-out, neglected and spurious in this street called Douradores which is my entire life: this office that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees, this monthly rented room where nothing transpires but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose owner I know in the way people know each other, these young men at the door of the old tavern, this toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these same characters repeating their same old lines, like a drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scenery turned inside out…

But I also realize that to flee this would mean to overcome it or repudiate it, and I’ll never overcome it, because I don’t go beyond it in reality, and I’ll never repudiate it, because no matter what I dream, I always remain where I am.

And my dreaming! The disgrace of escaping into myself, the cowardice of reducing my life to that refuse of the soul which others experience only in their sleep, in the posture of death as they snore, in that stillness when they look like highly developed vegetables!

I can’t make one noble gesture that’s not confined to my own soul, nor have one useless desire that’s not truly, utterly useless!

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?