The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (40 page)

Pessoa in the 1920s—his thirties—became a full citizen, assuming an active role in the economy and society that sustained him, however imperfectly. But he wasn’t a good businessman, and he really didn’t care for the active life, which he wrote off as “the least comfortable of suicides” (Text 247). In 1929, or perhaps the year before, he returned to his
Disquiet,
whose nature had changed, because he had changed: Pessoa was ready to write Pessoa. He still resorted to heteronyms, whom he claimed were better at feeling than he was (see
ASPECTS
),
but it was clearly
his own
unmitigated feelings that informed the poems of late Campos and the prose of Bernardo Soares, as Pessoa now called the assistant bookkeeper and pretended author of
The Book of Disquiet.
Bernardo Soares, a mature and larger version of Vicente Guedes, wasn’t a true heteronym. “He’s a semiheteronym,” Pessoa explained, “because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it” (in his January
13, 1935,
letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro). The Baron of Teive, probably conceived in
1928,
was a similarly thin disguise, a
semifiction, and the Campos of this period even more blatantly so. In
1930
Pessoa published the poem “Birthday,” a highly personal evocation of lost childhood, in the name of the naval engineer and with the date of his “birthday,” October 15, but the manuscript copy is dated June 13, Pessoa’s birthday
.

Fully half of The
Book of Disquiet
was written in the last six years ofPessoa’s life. It was now thoroughly a diary, not of things seen and done but of things thought and felt, the author’s Confessions, his “factless autobiography” (Text 12). Many of the passages were still fragmentary and unfinished, but at this point it would have made no sense to “complete” them. Pessoa had moved beyond literature; he was simply etching, on paper, his mind and soul. Disquiet, for Pessoa, was no longer an uncertain quantity, no longer a skittish feeling of anguish, not an intellectual trouble, nor even a psychological dis-ease. It was the author’s unforgettable awareness of his life that had passed, or was passing, or would pass. It was the strange fact of consciousness that makes death thinkable, or, more acutely, the consciousness of that consciousness. Disquiet was the unwanted but necessary condition for humanly existing. And so Bernardo Soares, after describing an afternoon in Lisbon so still that even the gulls in flight seemed motionless, honestly concludes: “Nothing oppressed. The late afternoon disquiet was my own; a cool breeze intermittently blew” (Text 79). Elsewhere, meditating on scattered clouds, Soares blurts out, “Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire!” What prompts this expressive outburst isn’t the clouds themselves but the sense of existential in-betweenness that their scatteredness reflects: “I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me” (Text 204). Soares isn’t a bookkeeper and isn’t even his dreams; he hovers in the middle, in the vacuous gap of consciousness
.

If the heteronyms were a theatrical representation of that gap, a fictional embodiment of Pessoa’s awareness of his eternal absence, then
The Book of Disquiet
was the locked diary that tells all, in the most direct language possible. And although we can read its words, the lock remains, for they strike us so bluntly, so close and so true, that we pause and wonder, “Was that me?” and a mysterious hand stops us, we forget, and keep reading
.

* * *

Pessoa published, in magazines, only twelve of the more than five hundred passages he wrote for
The Book of Disquiet.
The rest had to be ferreted out from among his thousands of papers and transcribed or—in the case of handwritten passages, which are the majority—deciphered, a task that kept scholars busy for decades. The first relatively complete edition
of The Book of Disquiet
did not see print until
1982,
forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. Two enlarged editions, which organize the contents in radically different ways, were published in the
1990s.
It is hard to know exactly what belongs in
The Book,
since Pessoa did not always label his texts, and no editor’s ordering of the material can claim to be more than a personal choice. The selection that follows is not representative of the whole book, being limited almost exclusively to untitled, diary-like passages written in the last six years of Pessoa’s life. The text numbers coincide with those found in the unabridged Penguin edition and in the
1998
Portuguese edition
.

1.

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it—without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species.
The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn’t acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we’re left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

Retaining from science only its fundamental precept—that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions—and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavors, and we hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write—devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mold anyone’s understanding—is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so
lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.

This isn’t the viewpoint of pessimists like Vigny,* for whom life was a prison in which he wove straw to keep busy and forget. To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleep-lessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing—for myself alone—wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travelers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.

6.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything
from others, and not to have others demand anything from me—this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place.... I remember that I’m on the fifth floor of the Rua dos Douradores, and I take a drowsy look at myself. I glance up from this half-written page at life, futile and without beauty, and at the cheap cigarette I’m about to extinguish in the ashtray beyond the fraying blotter. Me in this fifth-floor room, interrogating life!, saying what souls feel!, writing prose like a genius or a famous author! Me, here, a genius! ...

7.

Today, in one of the pointless and worthless daydreams that constitute a large part of my inner life, I imagined being forever free from the Rua dos Douradores, from Vasques my boss, from Moreira the head bookkeeper, from all the employees, from the delivery boy, the office boy, and the cat. In my dream I experienced freedom, as if the South Seas had offered me marvelous islands to be discovered. It would all be repose, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfillment of my being.

But even as I was imagining this, during my miniature midday holiday in a cafe, an unpleasant thought assaulted my dream: I realized I would feel regret. Yes, I say it as if confronted by the actual circumstance: I would feel regret. Vasques my boss, Moreira the head bookkeeper, Borges the cashier, all the young men, the cheerful boy who takes letters to the post office, the boy who makes deliveries, the gentle
cat—all this has become part of my life. And I wouldn’t be able to leave it without crying, without feeling that—like it or not—it was a part of me that would remain with all of them, and that to separate myself from them would be a partial death.

Besides, if tomorrow I were to bid them all farewell and take off my Rua dos Douradores suit, what other activity would I end up doing (for I would have to do something), or what other suit would I end up wearing (for I would have to wear some other suit)?

We all have a Vasques who’s the boss—visible for some of us, invisible for others. My Vasques goes by that very name, and he’s a hale and pleasant man, occasionally short-tempered but never two-faced, self-interested but basically fair, with a sense of justice that’s lacking in many great geniuses and human marvels of civilization, right and left. Other people answer to vanity, or to the lure of wealth, glory, immortality. For my boss I prefer the man named Vasques, who in difficult moments is easier to deal with than all the abstract bosses in the world.

Deeming that I earn too little, a friend of mine who’s a partner in a successful firm that does a lot of business with the government said the other day: “You’re being exploited, Soares.” And I remembered that indeed I am. But since in life we must all be exploited, I wonder if it’s any worse to be exploited by Vasques and his fabrics than by vanity, by glory, by resentment, by envy, or by the impossible.

Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.

And in the same way that others return to their homes, I retreat to my non-home: the large office on the Rua dos Douradores. I arrive at my desk as at a bulwark against life. I have a tender spot—tender to the point of tears—for my ledgers in which I keep other people’s accounts, for the old inkstand I use, for the hunched back of Sérgio, who draws up invoices a little beyond where I sit. I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul’s love, and so it’s all the same—should we feel the urge to give it—whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars.