The Book of Disquiet (80 page)
A. A. Crosse
This third Mr Crosse competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games published in the pages of English newspapers.
António Mora
As the chief theoretician of Neopaganism, a movement designed to replace an ailing and decadent Christianity, Mora passionately elucidated the genius of Caeiro and Reis, whom he regarded as direct poetic expressions of paganism. He also left dozens and dozens of typed and handwritten passages belonging to ambitious works-in-progress with titles such as
Return of the Gods
(co-authored by Ricardo Reis),
Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism
and
The Foundations of Paganism
(billed as a ‘rebuttal of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, and an attempt to reconstruct pagan Objectivism’).
Raphael Baldaya
Identified in a letter by Pessoa as an astrologer with a long beard, Baldaya was conceived in late 1915. In addition to horoscopes and his writings on the stars, he produced several philosophical texts, including a ‘Treatise on Negation’, in which he affirmed that being is ‘essentially Illusion and Falsehood. God is the Supreme Lie’.
Bernardo Soares
The ultimate fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet
seems to have taken on this job in 1928, presumably the same year he moved to the Rua dos Douradores, but he was originally cast in the role of a short-story writer. Pessoa’s strong kinship with Soares – whom he called a semiheteronym, since his was not a different personality but a mutilated version of Fernando’s – is reflected in their names, ‘Bernardo’ and ‘Soares’ containing almost the same letters as ‘Fernando’ and ‘Pessoa’.
Maria José
Pessoa’s only known female persona was the author of a single, long and pathetic love letter to Senhor António, a handsome metalworker who passed by her window on his way to and from work each day. Hunchbacked, virtually crippled, and dying of TB, Maria José had no intention of ever sending her desperate letter. ‘My days are numbered,’ she explained in one of its last paragraphs, ‘and I’m only writing this letter to hold it against my chest as if you’d written it to me instead of me to you.’
Baron of Teive
Conceived in 1928, the Baron may have been Pessoa’s last invented author. Similar in many respects to Bernardo Soares (Pessoa compares the two in his Preface to
Fictions of the Interlude
– in Appendix III), Teive may likewise be classified as a semi-heteronym, as a mutilated or distorted copy of Pessoa. Endowed with Pessoa’s ultra-rationalist bent, he also incarnated his creator’s aristocratic pretensions (Pessoa was rather proud
of the vaguely blue blood that trickled on his father’s side). Haunted, like Pessoa, by a helpless inability to finish any of his writing projects, the Baron finally took the rational, logical step of committing suicide. His creator, perhaps with a giggle, kept on writing.
Table of Contents
Notes on the Text and Translation
A Factless Autobiography
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