The Book of Disquiet (38 page)

Some are terrible sadists, others are inveterate pederasts, and still others confess in a loud, sad voice that they’re brutal with women, having brought them along life’s paths by the whip. They always let someone else pay for their coffee.

Some are poets, some are .....

I know no better antidote for that torrent of shadows than direct acquaintance with common human life – in its commercial reality, for instance, as exhibited on the Rua dos Douradores. With what relief I used to return from that madhouse of puppets to the real presence of Moreira, my supervisor, a genuine and competent bookkeeper, badly dressed and out of shape, but at any rate a man, something none of these others have succeeded in being.

278

Most men spontaneously live a fictitious and alien life. ‘Most people are other people,’* said Oscar Wilde, and he was right. Some spend their lives in pursuit of something they don’t want; others pursue something they want that’s useless to them; still others lose themselves .....

But most men are happy and enjoy life for no reason. Man usually doesn’t weep much, and when he complains, that’s his literature. Pessimism isn’t viable as a democratic formula. Those who lament the world’s woes are isolated – they lament only their own. A Leopardi or an Antero de Quental* doesn’t have a sweetheart? Then the universe is a torment. A Vigny feels he’s inadequately loved? The world is a prison. A Chateaubriand dreams the impossible? Human life is tedious. A Job is covered with boils? Earth is covered with boils. People step on some sad fellow’s corns? Alas for his feet, the suns and the stars!

Indifferent to all this, humanity keeps on eating and loving, weeping over only what it must weep, and for as short a time as possible – over the death of a son, for instance, who is soon forgotten except on his birthday, or over the loss of money, which only causes weeping until more money comes along or one gets used to the loss.

The will to live recovers and carries on. The dead are buried. Our losses are forgotten.

279

He left today for his home town, apparently for good. I mean the so-called office boy, the same man I’d come to regard as part of this human corporation, and therefore as part of me and my world. He left today. In the corridor, casually running into each other for the expected surprise of our farewell, he timidly returned my embrace, and I had enough self-control not to cry, as in my heart – independent of me – my ardent eyes wanted.

Whatever has been ours, because it was ours, even if only as a casual
presence in our daily routine or in what we see, becomes part of us. The man who left today for a Galician town I’ve never heard of was not, for me, the office boy; he was a vital part, because visible and human, of the substance of my life. Today I was diminished. I’m not quite the same. The office boy left today.

Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away. The office boy left today.

Wearier, older, and less willing, I sit down at the high desk and continue working from where I left off yesterday. But today’s vague tragedy, stirring thoughts I have to dominate by force, interrupts the automatic process of good bookkeeping. The only way I’m able to work is through an active inertia, as my own slave. The office boy left today.

Yes, tomorrow or another day, or whenever the bell will soundlessly toll my death or departure, I’ll also be one who’s no longer here, an old copier stowed away in the cabinet under the stairs. Yes, tomorrow or when Fate decides, the one in me who pretended to be I will come to an end. Will I go to my home town? I don’t know where I’ll go. Today the tragedy is visible because of an absence, considerable because it doesn’t deserve consideration. My God, my God, the office boy left today.

280

O night in which the stars feign light, O night that alone is the size of the Universe, make me, body and soul, part of your body, so that – being mere darkness – I’ll lose myself and become night as well, without any dreams as stars within me, nor a hoped-for sun shining with the future.

281

First it’s a sound that makes another sound, in the nocturnal hollow of things. Then it’s a low howl, accompanied by the creaking of the street’s swaying signboards. And then the voice of space becomes a shout, a roar, and everything shudders, nothing sways, and there’s silence in the dread of all this, like a speechless dread that sees another dread when the first one has passed.

Then there’s nothing but wind, just wind, and I sleepily notice how the doors shake in their frames and how the glass in the windows loudly resists.

I don’t sleep. I interexist.* A few vestiges of consciousness persist. I feel the weight of slumber but not of unconsciousness. I don’t exist. The wind… I wake up and go back to sleep without yet having slept. There’s a landscape of loud and indistinct sound beyond which I’m a stranger to myself. I cautiously delight in the possibility of sleeping. I really do sleep, but don’t know if I’m sleeping. In what seems to me like a slumber there is always a sound of the end of all things, the wind in the darkness, and, if I listen closely, the sound of my own lungs and heart.

282

After the last stars whitened into nothing in the morning sky and the breeze turned less cold in the oranged yellow of the light falling over several low-lying clouds, I finally succeeded in dragging my body – exhausted from nothing – out of the bed where I had sleeplessly pondered the universe.

I walked to the window with eyes that were burning from having stayed open all night. The light reflected off the crowded rooftops in various shades of pale yellow. I contemplated everything with the grand stupidity that comes from not sleeping. The yellow was wispy and insignificant against the hulking figures of the tall buildings. Far
off in the west (the direction I was facing), the horizon was already a greenish white.

I know that today will oppress me as when I can’t grasp a thing. I know that everything I do today will be marked not by weariness from the sleep I didn’t have, but by the insomnia I did have. I know that my existence will feel even more like sleep-walking than usual, not just because I haven’t slept but because I couldn’t sleep.

There are days that are philosophies, that suggest interpretations of life, that are marginal notes – full of critical observations – in the book of our universal destiny. This seems to be one of those days. I have the ludicrous impression that it is my heavy eyes and my empty brain that trace, like an absurd pencil, the letters of my profound and useless commentary.

283

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.

To be born free is the greatest splendour of man, making the humble hermit superior to kings and even to the gods, who are self-sufficient by their power but not by their contempt of it.

Death is a liberation because to die is to need no one. In death the wretched slave is forcibly set free from his pleasures, from his sufferings, from his coveted and ongoing life. The king is freed of the domains
he didn’t want to give up. Women who spread love are freed of the triumphs they cherish. Men who conquered are freed of the victories for which their lives were predestined.

Death ennobles, dressing our poor ridiculous bodies in finery they have never known. In death a man is free, even if he didn’t want freedom. In death he’s no longer a slave, even if he wept on giving up his slavery. Like a king whose greatest glory is his kingly title, and who as a man may be laughable but as a king is superior, so the dead man may be horribly deformed but is still superior, because death has freed him.

Tired, I close the shutters of my windows, I exclude the world, and I have a few moments of freedom. Tomorrow I’ll go back to being a slave, but right now – alone, needing no one, and worried only that some voice or presence might disturb me – I have my little freedom, my moment of excelsis.

Leaning back in my chair, I forget the life that oppresses me. Nothing pains me besides having felt pain.

284

Let’s not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.

Let’s not even love in our minds.

May we never know the feel of a woman’s kiss, not even in our dreams.

Artisans of morbidity, let us excel in teaching others how to cast off all illusions. Spectators of life, let us peer over all walls, with the pre-weariness of knowing that we’ll see nothing new or beautiful.

Weavers of despair, let us weave only shrouds – white shrouds for the dreams we never dreamed, black shrouds for the days that we died, grey shrouds for the gestures we merely dreamed, and royal purple shrouds for our useless sensations.

On the hills and in the valleys and along swampy
shores, hunters hunt wolves, deer, and wild ducks. Let us hate them, not because they kill but because they enjoy themselves (and we don’t).

May our facial expression consist of a wan smile, like that of someone who’s about to cry, a far-away gaze, like that of someone who doesn’t want to see, and a disdain in all its features, as when someone despises life and lives only to despise it.

And may our disdain be for those who work and struggle, and our hatred for those who hope and trust.

285

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.

Sometimes, when I’m actively engaged in life and have as clear a notion of myself as the next man, my mind is beset by a strange feeling of doubt: I begin to wonder if I exist, if I might not be someone else’s dream. I can imagine, with an almost carnal vividness, that I might be the character of a novel, moving within the reality constructed by a complex narrative, in the long waves of its style.

I’ve often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this makes me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones, everything being a story made up of stories, like
A Thousand and One Nights
, unreally taking place in the never-ending night.

If I think, everything seems absurd to me; if I feel, everything seems strange; if I want, it’s something in me that does the wanting. Whenever there’s action in me, I’m sure I wasn’t responsible for it. If I dream, it seems I’m being written. If I feel, it seems I’m being painted. If I want, it seems that I’ve been placed in a vehicle, like freight to be delivered, and that I continue with a movement I imagine is my own towards a destination I don’t want until I get there.

How confusing it all is! How much better it is to see rather than
think, to read rather than write! What I see may deceive me, but I don’t consider it mine. What I read may distress me, but I don’t have to feel bad for having written it. How painful everything is when we think of it as conscious thinkers, as contemplative beings whose consciousness has reached that second stage by which we know that we know! Although the day is gorgeous, I can’t help but think this way. To think or to feel? Or what third thing among the stage-sets in the back? Tedium of twilight and disarray, shut fans, weariness from having had to live…

286

We walked, still young, beneath the tall trees and the forest’s soft rustling. The moonlight made ponds out of the clearings that sprang into view along our aimless path, and their branch-tangled shores were more night than the night itself. The breeze of woodlands sighed among the trees. We talked about impossible things, and our voices were part of the night, the moon and the forest. We heard them as if they belonged to others.

The obscure forest wasn’t entirely pathless. Our steps wended along trails that we instinctively knew, among dappling shadows and streaks of cold, hard moonlight. We talked about impossible things, and the whole of that real-life landscape was just as impossible.