Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. He spent most of his life there but, after his father’s death, he lived in South Africa for nine years when his mother married the Portuguese consul in Durban. In those years he became fluent in English and developed a love for English writers such as Shakespeare and Milton. This influenced him to write his first collections of poems and journals in English, while his first book in Portuguese was published just two years before his death.

On leaving South Africa he returned to Lisbon, where he became involved in the modernist group ‘Orpheu’ and had a major role in the development of modernism in Portugal. During his life he was virtually unknown, avoiding society and the literary world, and although he wrote a vast amount, most of it was published posthumously. After his death in Lisbon in 1935, a trunk was found containing over 25,000 items – among them were collections of poems, letters and journals, from which The Book of Disquiet is a selection.

Praise for The Book of Disquiet

‘It could not have been written in England: there is too much thought racing hopelessly around. The elegance of the style, well conveyed in what seems to be a more than adequate translation, is an important component and a very ironic one. The diary disturbs from beginning to end… There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa. We must be given the chance to learn more about him’ Anthony Burgess, Observer

‘Pessoa’s near-novel is a complete masterpiece, the sort of book one makes friends with and cannot bear to be parted with. Boredom informs it, but not boringly. Pessoa loved the minutiae of what we care to deem the ordinary life, and that love enriches and deepens his art’ Paul Bailey, Independent

‘The very book to read when you wake at 3am and can’t get back to sleep – mysteries, misgivings, fears and dreams and wonderment. Like nothing else’ Philip Pullman

‘It was a real bonus when Serpent’s Tail published The Book of Disquiet, a meandering, melancholic series of reveries and meditations. Pessoa’s amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his unique poetic output. We cannot learn too much about him’ William Boyd, TLS Books of the Year

‘In a time that celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote’ John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph

‘[A] classic of existential literature’ Emma Tennant, Independent on Sunday

‘Many British reviewers have pegged Pessoa as a great long-lost modernist, but he also calls up echoes of Beckett’s exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire; Melville’s evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges; even the cranky hermeticism of Witold Gombrowicz’ Village Voice

‘This is an astonishing novel, one which batters you, pierces you, awakens and numbs you’ Independent on Sunday

‘This book has moved me more than anything I have read in years. I have rarely encountered such exhilarating lugubriousness’ Daily Telegraph

‘Portugal’s greatest poet’ The Times

‘A haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims’ George Steiner, Observer

The BOOK of DISQUIET

Fernando Pessoa

Edited by Maria José de Lancastre

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Introduction by William Boyd

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Fernando Pessoa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Translation copyright © 1991 by Serpent’s Tail
Introduction copyright © William Boyd 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published as Livro do desassossego por Bernardo Soares

This edition follows the selection made by Maria José de Lancastre for the Italian edition published by Feltrinelli.

First published in 1991 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com

First published in this edition in 2010

ISBN 978 1 84668 735 8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Introduction

O homem nâo é um animal
É uma came inteligente
Embora às vezes doente.

[Man is not an animal
Is intelligent flesh
Although sometimes ill.]

Something of the baffling, beguiling, disturbing appeal of Fernando Pessoa is contained in these three lines of poetry taken from a short poem he wrote in 1935, the year of his death, called ‘Love is the Essential’. Pessoa was obsessed by the schism between our ‘concrete’ and our ‘abstract’ natures – summed up here in the concept of carne inteligente. Sometimes he wished he were a simple unreflecting animal, untroubled by self-consciousness, but he saw in our uniquely human ability to reflect on and analyse ourselves the source of all our pleasures in life (he described sunsets as ‘an intellectual experience’) – and its pain. Hence the wry rejoinder -‘although sometimes ill’ – a very Pessoa-esque note to strike. The comedic aspects of our short, troubled existences also entertained him. The hilarious absurdity of the human predicament was as obvious to him as its inherent, melancholy pointlessness.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great figures of 20th-century European modernism. The most exotic portion of his life occurred in his youth. At the age of seven he left Lisbon for Durban, South Africa, where he lived with his mother and stepfather until he was seventeen. This sojourn provoked in him an enduring anglophilia (his first poems were in English) and a sense of being a permanent outsider. It is perhaps helpful to see him as a Portuguese cross between Franz Kafka and TS Eliot – a maverick, unclassifiable spirit wrapped up in a carapace of petit-bourgeois conformity. Like Kafka (insurance) and Eliot (banking), Pessoa earned his living on his return from South Africa in a humdrum professional world. He became a commercial translator, writing business letters in English and French for Portuguese companies. In the many photographs we have of him in his adult life he looks the perfect dry functionary: moustachioed, dapper, always with a hat and a tie – I’homme moyen sensual – as if the rectitude and tedium of his daily job were in some way necessary to curb the teeming, abundant life of the mind within.

Intriguingly, Pessoa’s literary fame is entirely posthumous. During his life he was a very minor figure on the fringes of the Lisbon artistic and intellectual scene, an obscure footnote in the annals of 20th-century Portuguese poetry. He published hardly anything and it was only the discovery of a vast trunk of manuscripts after his death that has provided us with the copious poetry and other prose writings – of which The Book of Disquiet is by far the major element.

What makes Pessoa extraordinary in a modernist–literary sense is his invention of what he called ‘heteronyms’. Pessoa published poems under his own name but also under the names of other identities. Possessing a disguise far more complex than mere pseudonyms, these heteronym-poets had styles, biographies and personalities of their own, as if they really were distinct individuals who were born, lived and died apart from their creator. There are seventy-two distinct heteronyms in the Pessoa oeuvre but four predominate: the poets Alberto Caiero, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos and the author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares.

Pessoa regarded Soares as the closest to himself – a minor clerk whiling away his life in rented rooms – describing him as a ‘mutilation of my personality’. The Soares heteronym evolved earlier and lasted far longer than any of the others and his life’s work – the fragmented journal and collection of philosophical musings that make up The Book of Disquiet – was both incomplete and unorganised when Pessoa died in 1935 (of hepatitis, in fact: Pessoa was also a dedicated but discreet alcoholic). Indeed, the form that the published book takes is something of an estimation - so random and confused were Pessoa’s plans for the finished volume. But, fittingly, the mystery and disorder of the jottings and pages somehow suit the book’s tone and atmosphere. Pessoa has been described by Octavio Paz as a ‘solemn investigator of futile things’, the epitome of an empty man who, in his helplessness, creates a world in order to discover his true identity. It’s in this spirit that we should read The Book of Disquiet, not only to locate the echo of our own disquiet about our life and the world we occupy, but also to go on a mesmerizing journey with one of the most fascinating minds in European literature.

Translator’s note

The Book of Disquiet (Livro do desassossego) is the most extensive prose work written by Portugal’s greatest poet, Fernando Pessoa. He was engaged in writing it, always in fragmentary form, from 1912 until his death in 1935, although the first complete Portuguese edition only appeared in 1982. As well as writing under his own name, Pessoa created a number of ‘heteronyms’, imaginary authors to whom he gave complete biographies and who wrote in styles and expressed philosophies and attitudes different from his own. Pessoa attributed the authorship of The Book of Disquiet to Bernardo Soares, who was, he said only ‘a semi-heteronym because, although his personality is not mine, it is not different from but rather a simple mutilation of my personality. It’s me minus reason and affectivity.’

Very little of this ‘intimate diary’ was published in his lifetime. The book itself was handwritten in notebooks or typed on frequently undated and undatable sheets of paper. The work of deciphering and collating all this material was carried out by Maria Aliete Galhoz, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. This translation is based on the thematic selection edited by Maria José dc Lancastre, a leading Pessoa scholar. The numbers given in parentheses at the beginning of each text refer to the numbering of the original 1982 edition published in Lisbon by Ática. […] indicates that words or phrases in the original are either illegible or missing.

The translator would like to thank Pete Ayrton, Annella McDermott, Faye Carney and Martin Jenkins for all their help and advice.

Introduction

Bernardo Soares

Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station. Amongst the clientele of such places, which are rarely busy except on Sundays, one is as likely to encounter the eccentric as the nondescript, to find people who are but a series of parentheses in the book of life.

There was a period in my life when a combination of economic necessity and a desire for peace and quiet led me to frequent just such a restaurant. I would dine at around seven each night and, as chance would have it, I was almost always there at the same time as one particular man. At first I took little notice of him but as time passed he came to interest me.

He was a man in his thirties, thin, fairly tall, very hunched when sitting though less so when standing, and dressed with a not entirely unselfconscious negligence. Not even the suffering apparent in his pale, unremarkable features added any interest to them nor was it easy to pinpoint the origin of that suffering. It could have been any number of things: hardship, grief or simply the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having suffered too much.

He always ate sparingly and afterwards would smoke a cigarette rolled from cheap tobacco. He would watch the other customers, not suspiciously, but as if genuinely interested in them. He did not scrutinize them as though wanting to fix their faces or any outward evidence of their personalities in his memory, rather he was simply intrigued by them. And it was this odd trait of his that first aroused my curiosity.

I began to observe him more closely. I noticed that a certain hesitant intelligence illuminated his features, but his face was so often clouded by exhaustion, by the inertia of cold fear, that it was usually hard to see beyond this.

I learned from a waiter at the restaurant that he worked as a clerk in a company that had its office nearby.

One day there was a scuffle in the street immediately outside the restaurant – a fight between two men. The customers all rushed to the windows, as did I and the man I’ve been describing. I made some banal comment to him and he replied in kind. His voice was dull and tremulous, the voice of one who hopes for nothing because all hope is vain. But perhaps it was foolish of me to attribute so much to my evening companion at the restaurant.

I don’t quite know why but after that we always used to greet each other. And then one day; prompted perhaps by the foolish coincidence of us both turning up for supper later than usual, at half past nine, we struck up a casual conversation. At one point he asked me if I was a writer. I said I was. I mentioned the magazine Orpheu*, which had recently come out. To my surprise he praised it, indeed praised it highly. When I voiced my surprise, saying that the art of those who wrote for Orpheu tended to appeal only to a small minority, he replied that maybe he was one of that minority. Anyway, he added, he was not entirely unfamiliar with that art for, he remarked timidly, since he had nowhere to go and nothing to do, no friends to visit and no interest in reading books, after supper he usually returned to his rented room and passed the night writing.

Fernanda Pessoa

The BOOK of DISQUIET

1 [90]

Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.

2 [124]

The journey in my head

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

3 [81]

Today, during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of either purpose or dignity, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life, I imagined myself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of my boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. In dreams, that freedom felt to me as if the South Seas had proffered up a gift of marvellous islands as yet undiscovered. Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

But suddenly, even as I imagined this (during the brief holiday afforded by my lunch break), a feeling of displeasure erupted into the dream: I would be sad. Yes, I say it quite seriously: I would be sad. For my boss Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Borges the cashier, all the lads, the cheery boy who takes the letters to the post office, the errand boy, the friendly cat - they have all become part of my life. I could never leave all that behind without weeping, without realizing, however displeasing the thought, that part of me would remain with them and that losing them would be akin to death.

Moreover, if I left them all tomorrow and discarded this Rua dos Douradores suit of clothes I wear, what else would I do? Because I would have to do something. And what suit would I wear? Because I would have to wear another suit.

We all have a Senhor Vasques; sometimes he’s a tangible human being, sometimes not. In my case he really is called Vasques and he’s a pleasant, healthy chap, a bit brusque at times but he’s no doubledealer. He’s selfish but basically fair, much fairer than many of the great geniuses and many of the human marvels of civilization on both left and right. For many people Vasques takes the form of vanity, a desire for greater wealth, for glory or immortality … Personally I prefer to have Vasques as my real life boss since, in times of difficulty, he’s easier to deal with than any abstraction the world has to offer.

The other day a friend, who’s a partner in a prosperous company that does business throughout the country and who considers my salary to be distinctly on the low side, said to me: Tou’re being exploited, Soares.’ This made me realize that indeed I am; but since it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited, my question would be: is it any worse being exploited by Senhor Vasques and his textile company than by vanity, glory, resentment, envy or the impossible?

Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.

And I return to an other’s house, to the spacious office in the Rua dos Douradores, the way some return to their homes. I approach my desk as if it were a bulwark against life. I feel such an overwhelming sense of tenderness that my eyes fill with tears for my books that are in reality the books of other people whose accounts I keep, for the inkwell I use, for Sergio’s stooped shoulders as, not far from me, he sits writing out bills of lading. I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars.

4 [114]

With the soul’s equivalent of a wry smile, I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up for ever in Rua dos Douradores, in this office, surrounded by these people. I have enough money to buy food and drink, I have somewhere to live and enough free time in which to dream, write - and sleep - what more can I ask of the gods or hope for from Fate?

I had great ambitions and extravagant dreams, but so did the errand boy and the seamstress, for everyone has dreams; the only difference is whether or not we have the strength to fulfil them or a destiny that will fulfil them through us.

When it comes to dreams, I’m no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that’s an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I’m just the same.

I know that there are islands in the South and grand cosmopolitan passions and […]. I’m sure that even if I held the world in my hand, I’d exchange it all for a tram ticket back to Rua dos Douradores.

Perhaps it’s my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

I’ll miss Moreira, but what does missing someone matter compared with a chance for real promotion?

I know that the day I’m made chief book-keeper to Vasques & Co. will be one of the greatest days of my life. I know it with a prescient bitterness and irony but I know it with all the finality that certainty can bring.

5 [91]

Senhor Vasques. I often find myself mesmerized by Senhor Vasques. What does this man represent to me beyond the chance inconvenience of his being master of my time, of the daylight hours of my life? He treats me well, he always talks to me in a friendly enough manner except on the odd occasion when he’s been offhand because of some private worry, but then he was offhand with everyone. So why do I think about him so much? Is he a symbol? A motive force? What is he to me?

Senhor Vasques. I remember him now as I will in the future with the nostalgia I know I will feel for him then. I’ll be living quietly in a little house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I’m not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I’U be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories. Wherever I am, I will think nostalgically of my boss Senhor Vasques and the office in Rua dos Douradores, and for me the monotony of my daily life will be like the memory of loves that never came my way and of triumphs that were never to be mine.

Senhor Vasques. I see him from that future perspective as clearly as I see him here today: medium height, thickset, coarse, with his particular limitations and affections, frank and astute, brusque and affable. It isn’t only money that marks him out as a boss, you can see it in his slow, hairy hands marked by plump veins like coloured muscles, his neck, strong but not too thick, and his firm, rosy cheeks above the dark, neatly trimmed beard. I see him, see the deliberate but energetic gestures, his eyes reflecting from within his thoughts about the world without. I’m troubled if I displease him and my soul is gladdened by his smile, a broad, human smile, warm as the applause of a large crowd.

Perhaps the reason the ordinary, almost vulgar figure of Senhor Vasques so often tangles with my intelligence and distracts me from myself is simply because there’s no one else in my life of greater stature. I think there’s some symbolism in all this. I believe, or almost believe, that somewhere in a distant life this man was something more to me than he is today.

6 [155]

Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me.

And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves which is something beyond resolution.

7 [63]

I went into the barber’s as I usually do, experiencing the pleasure I always get from being able to enter places known to me without suffering the least distress. My sensitivity to all things new is a constant affliction to me; I only feel safe in places I have been in before.

When I sat down in the chair and the young barber placed a clean, cold linen towel around my neck, it occurred to me to ask after his colleague, a vigorous, older man, who had been ill but who usually worked at the chair to my right. The question arose spontaneously, simply because the place reminded me of him. As fingers busied themselves tucking in the last bit of towel between my neck and my collar, the voice behind the towel and me answered flatly: ‘He died yesterday.’ My irrational good humour died as suddenly as the now eternally absent barber from the chair beside me. My every thought froze. I said nothing.

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

The dull old man with dirty gaiters I often used to pass at half past nine in the morning. The lame lottery salesman who pestered me without success. The plump, rosy old gentleman with the cigar, who used to stand at the door of the tobacconist’s. The pale-cheeked tobacconist himself. What has become of those people who, just because I saw them day after day, became part of my life? Tomorrow I too will disappear from Rua da Prata, Rua dos Douradores, Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: ‘I wonder what’s become of him?’ And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

The sleeping partner of the company, a man much troubled by obscure ailments, was suddenly taken with the notion (a caprice that came on him, it seems, between afflictions) that he wanted to have a group photograph taken of the office staff. So, the day before yesterday, following the instructions of the jolly photographer, we all lined up against the grubby white partition that serves as a rickety wooden division between the general office and Senhor Vasques’s office. In the centre stood Vasques himself; on either side of him, according to a hierarchy that began logically enough but rapidly broke down, stood the other men who gather here each day, in body, to perform the small tasks, the ultimate aim of which is a secret known only to the gods.

Today, when I arrived at the office, a little late and having in fact completely forgotten about the frozen moment captured twice by the photographer, I found Moreira, an unexpectedly early bird, and one of the clerks poring over some blackish objects that I recognized with a start as being the first prints of the photographs. They were, in fact, two copies of the same photograph, the one that had come out best.

I experienced the pain of truth when I saw myself there, because, inevitably, it was my face I looked for first. I have never had a very high opinion of my physical appearance but never before have I felt such a nonentity as I did then, comparing myself with the other faces, so familiar to me, in that line-up of my daily companions. I look like a rather dull Jesuit. My thin, inexpressive face betrays no intelligence, no intensity, nothing whatever to make it stand out from the stagnant tide of the other faces. But they’re not a stagnant tide. There are some really expressive faces there. Senhor Vasques is exactly as he is in real life - the firm, likable face, the steady gaze, all set off by the stiff moustache. The energy and intelligence of the man - qualities which are after all utterly banal and to be found in thousands of other men all over the world - are stamped on that photograph as if it were a psychological passport. The two travelling salesmen look superb; the clerk has come out well but he’s half hidden behind Moreira. And Moreira! My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks much more human than I do! Even the errand boy - I detect in myself, without being able to suppress it, a feeling that I hope is not envy – has a directness in his smile that far outshines the insignificant dullness of my face, of me, the sphinx of the stationery cupboard.

What does all this mean? Is it true that the camera never lies? What is this truth documented by a cold lens? Who am I that I possess such a face? Honestly… And then to add insult to injury… Moreira suddenly said to me: ‘It’s a really good one of you.’ And then, turning to the clerk, ‘It’s the absolute image of him, isn’t it?’ The clerk’s happy and companionable agreement signalled my final relegation to the rubbish heap.

9 [27]

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I’m nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I’m nobody, nobody. I don’t know how to feel or think or love. I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.

I’m always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I’m falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous* space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.

And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there’s the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.

If only I could think! If only I could feel!

My mother died very young; I never knew her…

11 [29]

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

Today is one of those days when the monotony of everything closes about me as if I had just entered a prison. That monotony,

however, is just the monotony of being me. Each face, even if it belongs to someone we saw only yesterday, is different today simply because today is not yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there will never be another like it in the world. Only in the soul is there the absolute identity (albeit a false identity) in which everything resembles everything else and everything is simplified. The world is made up of promontories and peaks but all our myopic vision allows us to see is a thin all-pervading mist.

I’d like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love. I want to set off, not for some impossible Indies or for the great islands that lie far to the south of all other lands, but for anywhere, be it village or desert, that has the virtue of not being here. What I want is not to see these faces, this daily round of days. I want a rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. A hut by the sea, even a cave on a rugged mountain ledge, would be enough. Unfortunately, my will alone cannot give me that.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange – is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us. Even I, who have just expressed my desire to have a hut or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, that is to say from the monotony of being myself, would I really dare to go off to this hut or cave, knowing and understanding that, since the monotony exists in me alone, I would never be free of it ? Suffocating where I am and because I am where I am, would I breathe any better there when it is my lungs that are diseased and not the air about me? Who is to say that I, longing out loud for the pure sun and the open fields, for the bright sea and the wide horizon, would not miss my bed, or my meals, or having to go down eight flights of stairs to the street, or dropping in at the tobacconist’s on the corner, or saying good morning to the barber standing idly by?

Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. Everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing? A ray of sun, a cloud whose own sudden shadow warns of its coming, a breeze getting up, the silence that follows when it drops, certain faces, some voices, the easy smiles as they talk, and then the night into which emerge, meaningless, the broken hieroglyphs of the stars.

13 [133]

I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth, and my uncle’s moral hand had never led me to an office in Lisbon, and I had never moved on from there to other offices to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on.

I know that had that non-existent past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, are at least better than all the pages I would undoubtedly have only daydreamed about given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul.

Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.

If I had to fill in the space provided on a questionnaire to list one’s formative literary influences, on the first dotted line I would write the name of Cesário Verde*, but the list would be

incomplete without the names of Senhor Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Vieira the cashier and Antonio the office boy. And after each of them I would write in capital letters the key word: LISBON.

In fact, they were all as important as Cesário Verde in providing corrective coefficients for my vision of the world. I think ‘corrective coefficients’ is the term (though, of course, I’m unsure of its exact meaning) that engineers use of a methodology that applies mathematics to life. If it is the term, that’s what they were to me. If it isn’t, let it stand for what might have been, and my intention serve in place of a failed metaphor.

When I consider, with all the clarity I can muster, what my life has apparently been, I imagine it as some brightly coloured scrap of litter - a chocolate wrapper or a cigar ring - that the eavesdropping waitress brushes lightly from the soiled tablecloth into the dustpan, amongst the crumbs and crusts of reality itself. It stands out from those things whose fate it shares by virtue of a privilege that is also destined for the dustpan. The gods continue their conversations above the sweeping, indifferent to these incidents in the world below.

Yes, if I had been rich, cosseted, carefully groomed and ornamental, I would never have known that brief moment as a pretty piece of paper amongst the breadcrumbs; I would have been left on one of fortune’s trays - ‘Not for me, thank you’ - and returned to the sideboard to grow old and stale. Discarded once I have served my purpose, I am thus relegated to the rubbish bin, along with the crumbs of what remains of Christ’s body, unable even to imagine what will come after, under what stars; but I know there will be an ‘after’.

14 [118]

I’ve come to the realization that I’m always thinking and listening to two things at once. I expect everyone does that a little. Some impressions are so vague that only when we remember them afterwards are we aware of them at all. I think these impressions form a part (the internal part, perhaps) of this double attention we all pay to things. In my case the two realities I attend to have equal weight. In that lies my originality. In that, perhaps, lie both my tragedy and the comedy of my tragedy.

I write carefully, bent over the book in which I measure out in balance sheets the futile history of an obscure company and, at the same time and with equal attention, my thoughts follow the route of an imaginary ship through oriental landscapes that have never existed. The two things are equally clear, equally visible to me: the ruled page on which I meticulously write the lines of the epic commercial poem that is Vasques & Co. and the deck where, a little to one side of the lines made by the tarred spaces between the planks, I watch intently the rows of deckchairs and the stretched-out legs of people relaxing on the voyage.

(If I were knocked down by a child’s bicycle, that bicycle would become part of my story.)

The smoking room protrudes on to the deck, preventing me from seeing anything more than their legs.

I reach for the inkwell with my pen and from the door of the smoking room - […] right where I feel myself to be standing - emerges the figure of the stranger. He turns his back on me and goes over to the others. He walks slowly and I can deduce nothing from his back […]. I begin another entry in the accounts book. I try to see where I went wrong. Marques’s accounts should be debited not credited (I imagine him: plump, amiable, full of jokes and, in an instant, the ship has vanished).

After the last of the rain had fallen from the sky and come to earth - leaving the sky clear and the earth damp and gleaming - the world below grew joyful in the cool left by the rain, and the greater clarity of life that returned with the blue of the heavens furnished each soul with its own sky, each heart with a new freshness.

Whether we like it or not, we are slaves to the hour in all its forms and colours, we are the subjects of heaven and earth. The part of us that despises its surroundings and plunges deepest into the forests within us does not take the same paths when it rains as when the sky is clear. Simply because it’s raining or has stopped raining, obscure transmutations take place, felt only perhaps in the very heart of our most abstract feelings; we feel these transmutations without knowing it because we feel the weather even when we are unaware that we do.

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That’s why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently. Today, as I note down these few impressions in a legitimate break brought about by a shortage of work, I am the person carefully transcribing them, the person who is pleased not to have to work just now, the person who looks at the sky even though he can’t actually see it from here, the person who is thinking all this, and the person feeling physically at ease and noticing that his hands are still slightly cold. And, like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure who writes, leaning against Borges’s high desk where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me.

16 [74]

[…] ships that pass in the night and neither acknowledge nor recognize one another […]

17 [96]

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape. Yet I live the most sordid and ordinary of real lives and the most intense and constant of dream lives. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during his rest hour - two miseries inhabiting one body.

With the clarity afforded by the lightning flashes of reason that pick out from the thick blackness of life the immediate objects it is composed of, I see with utter lucidity all that is base, flaccid, neglected and factitious in this Rua dos Douradores that makes up my entire life: the squalid office whose squalor seeps into the very marrow of its inhabitants’ bones, the room, rented by the month, in which nothing happens except the living death of its occupant, the grocer’s shop on the corner whose owner I know only in the casual way people do know each other, the boys standing at the door of the old tavern, the laborious futility of each identical day, the same characters constantly rehearsing their roles, like a drama consisting only of scenery and in which even that scenery is facing the wrong way …

But I also see that in order to flee from all this I must either master it or repudiate it. I do not master it because I cannot rise above reality and I do not repudiate it because, whatever I may dream, I always remain exactly where I am.

And what of my dreams? That shameful flight into myself, the cowardice of mistaking for life the rubbish tip of a soul that others only visit in their sleep, in that semblance of death through which they snore, in that calm state in which, more than anything, they look like highly evolved vegetables! Unable to make a single noble gesture other than to myself, or to have one vain desire that was not utterly vain!

Caesar gave the ultimate definition of ambition when he said: ‘Better to be the chief of a village than a subaltern in Rome’. I enjoy no such position either in a village or in Rome. At least the grocer merits some respect on the block between Rua da Assumpção and Rua da Victoria; he’s the Caesar of the whole block. Am I superior to him? In what respect when nothingness confers no superiority, no inferiority, and permits no comparisons?

The grocer is the Caesar of a whole block and the women, quite rightly, adore him.

And so I drag myself along, doing things I don’t want to do and dreaming of what I cannot have […] as pointless as a public clock that’s stopped…

18 [107]

In the first few days of this sudden autumn, when the darkness seems in some way premature, it feels as if we have lingered too long over our daily tasks and, even in the midst of the daily round, I savour in advance the pleasure of not working that the darkness brings with it, for darkness means night and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights go on in the big office, banishing the~ darkness, and we move seamlessly from day to evening shift, I am assailed by an absurd sense of comfort, like the memory of another, and I feel as contented with what I write as if I were sitting reading myself to sleep in bed.

We are all of us the slaves of external circumstance: even at a table in some backstreet café, a sunny day can open up before us visions of wide fields; a shadow over the countryside can cause us to shrink inside ourselves, seeking uneasy shelter in the doorless house that is our self; and, even in the midst of daytime things, the arrival of darkness can open out, like a slowly spreading fan, a deep awareness of our need for rest.

But we don’t get behind in our work because of this, rather it cheers us on. We’re not working any more; we’re enjoying ourselves performing the task to which we are condemned. And suddenly, there on the vast ruled sheet of my book-keeper’s destiny, stands my old aunts’ house, quite shut off from the world, where the tea is still brought in at the sleepy hour of ten o’clock, and the oil lamp of my lost childhood, its pool of light illuminating only the tablecloth, plunges into darkness my vision of Moreira, infinitely far from me, lit now by a black electricity. Tea is served - by the maid who’s even older than my aunts and who brings it in with the slightly sleepy demeanour and the tetchily patient tenderness of very old servants - and across the whole of my dead past I faultlessly write a number or a sum. I am reabsorbed into myself again, I lose myself in me, I forget myself in those far-off nights, unpolluted by duty and the world, virginally pure of mystery and future.

And so gentle is this feeling distracting me from my debit and credit columns that if someone asks me a question, I reply with equal gentleness, as if my very being were hollow, as if I were nothing but a typewriter that I carry with me, a portable version of my own open self. Such an interruption of my dreams does not jar; so gentle are they that I continue to dream them even while I speak, write, answer, carry on a conversation. At last the lost teatime draws to an end and it’s time for the office to close. I slowly shut the book and raise my eyes, weary with unshed tears, and of all the mingled feelings this arouses, I feel more than anything a sense of sadness that the closing of the office may mean the ending of my dream; that the gesture of my hand closing the book may mean covering up my own irreparable past; that I will go to the bed of life not in the least tired, but companionless and troubled, caught in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, twin tides flowing in the black night, at the outer limits of nostalgia and desolation.

19 [115]

Today my body felt afflicted by the old anguish that occasionally wells up inside me and at the restaurant or eating house, whose upstairs room provides some basis of continuity to my existence, I neither ate properly nor drank as much as I would normally drink. When I left, the waiter, noticing that the bottle of wine was still half-full, turned to me and said: ‘Goodnight, Senhor Soares. Hope you feel better tomorrow.’

Just as if the wind had suddenly dispersed the clouds obscuring the sky, the clarion call of that simple phrase eased my soul. And then I realized something I have never fully recognized before: that I have a spontaneous, natural sympathy with these waiters in cafés and restaurants, with barbers and street corner errand boys, which I cannot honestly say I feel for those with whom I have more intimate relations, if ‘intimate’ is the right word…

Fraternity is a very subtle thing.

Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire with property in England and Switzerland and the Socialist boss of a village there is no qualitative difference, only quantitative. Below […] them come us, the amorphous ones, the unruly dramatist William Shakespeare, the school teacher John Milton, that vagabond Dante Alighieri, the boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who always tells me stories, and the waiter who, simply because I drank only half my bottle of wine, proffered the fraternal hope that I would feel better tomorrow.

20 [56]

Only one thing surprises me more than the stupidity with which most men live their lives and that is the intelligence inherent in that stupidity.

To all appearances, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrific. I’m having lunch in this ordinary restaurant and I look over at the cook behind the counter and at the old waiter right next to me, serving me as he has served others here for, I believe, the past thirty years. What are these men’s lives like? For forty years the cook has spent nearly all of every day in a kitchen; he has a few breaks; he sleeps relatively little; sometimes he goes back to his village whence he returns unhesitatingly and without regret; he slowly accumulates his slowly earned money, which he does not propose spending; he would fall ill if he had to abandon (for ever) his kitchen for the land he bought in Galicia; he’s lived in Lisbon for forty years and he’s never even been to the Rotunda*, or to the theatre, and only once to the Coliseu (whose clowns still inhabit the inner interstices of his life). He got married, how or why I don’t know, has four sons and one daughter and, as he leans out over the counter towards my table, his smile conveys a great, solemn, contented happiness. He isn’t pretending, nor does he have any reason to. If he seems happy it’s because he really is.

And what about the old waiter who serves me and who, for what must be the millionth time in his career, has just placed a coffee on the table before me? His life is the same as the cook’s, the only difference being the four or five yards that separate the kitchen where one works from the restaurant dining room where the other works. Apart from minor differences like having two rather than five children, paying more frequent visits to Galicia, and knowing Lisbon better than the cook (as well as Oporto where he lived for four years), he is equally contented.