The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (23 page)

But since the engineer Alvaro de Campos will be with me for most of tomorrow, I’m not sure I can avoid his company—which at any rate is pleasant—during the ride to Janelas Verdes.

This engineer, who’s an old friend, has something to say to you. He refuses to give me any details, but I hope and trust that, in your presence, he’ll see fit to tell me, or tell you, or tell us, what it’s all about.

Until then I’ll remain silent, respectful, and even expectant.

Till tomorrow, sweet lips,

Fernando

Sunday, 29 September 1929

Dear little Ophelia,

So that you won’t say I haven’t written you, since in fact I haven’t, I’m writing you. It won’t be just a line, like I said, but it won’t be many lines. I’m sick, mainly due to all of yesterday’s worries and troubles. If you don’t want to believe I’m sick, then you obviously won’t believe it. But please don’t tell me you don’t believe it. It’s bad enough to be sick without you doubting whether it’s true, or asking me to account for my health as if I were able to, or as if I were obliged to account to anyone about anything.

What I said about going to Cascais (which means Cascais, Sintra, Caxias or anywhere else outside Lisbon but not too far) is absolutely true: true, at least, in intent. I’ve reached that age when a man comes into full possession of his talents and his mind is at the height of its powers. And so it’s time for me to consolidate my literary work, finishing up certain things, compiling others, and writing some things that are still in my head. To do all this I need peace and quiet, and relative isolation. Unfortunately I can’t quit the offices where I work (for the obvious reason that I have no other income), but by setting aside two days a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays) for my office duties, I can have the other five days for myself. There you have the story of Cascais.

My life’s entire future depends on whether I can do this, and soon, for my life revolves around my literary work, however good or bad it may be. Everything else in life is of secondary interest to me. Some things I would naturally enjoy having, while others leave me completely indifferent. Those who know and deal with me have to understand that that’s how I am, and that to want me to have the feelings (which I fully respect) of an ordinary person is like wanting me to have blue eyes and blond hair. And to treat me as if I were someone else isn’t the best way to hold on to my affection. It would be better to go and find that “someone else” for whom such treatment is suitable.

I’m very, very fond of you, Ophelia. I adore your character and temperament. If I marry, it will only be with you. It remains to be seen whether marriage and home (or whatever one wants to call it)
are compatible with my life of thought. I doubt it. For now I want to organize, without delay, this life of thought and my literary work. If I can’t organize it, then I won’t even think of thinking about marriage. And if I organize it in such a way that marriage would be a hindrance, then I’m sure not to marry. But I suspect this won’t be the case. The future, and I mean the near future, will tell.

There you have it, and it happens to be the truth.

So long, Ophelia. Sleep and eat, and don’t lose any weight.

Your very devoted

Fernando

9 October 1929

Terrible Baby:

I like your letters, which are sweet, and I like you, because you’re sweet too. And you’re candy, and you’re a wasp, and you’re honey, which comes from bees and not wasps, and everything’s just fine, and Baby should always write me, even when I don’t, which is always, and I’m sad, and I’m crazy, and no one likes me, and why should they, and that’s exactly right, and everything goes back to the beginning, and I think I’ll call you today, and I’d like to kiss you precisely and voraciously on the lips, and to eat your lips and whatever little kisses you’re hiding there, and to lean on your shoulder and slide into the softness of your little doves, and to beg your pardon, and the pardon to be make-believe, and to do it over and over and period until I start again, and why do you like a scoundrel and a troll and a fat slob with a face like a gas meter and the expression of someone who’s not there but in the toilet next door, and indeed, and finally, and I’m going to stop because I’m insane, and I always have been, it’s from birth, which is to say ever since I was born, and I wish Baby were my doll so I could do like a child, taking off her clothes, and I’ve reached the end of the page, and this doesn’t seem like it could be written by a human being, but it was written by me.

Fernando

9 October 1929

Beastly Baby,

Forgive me for troubling you. The spring of the rattletrap in my head finally snapped, and my mind, which had already ceased to exist, went tr-tr-r-r-r-...

I’m writing you after having just called, and of course I’ll call you again, if it doesn’t frazzle your nerves, and of course it won’t be at just any time but at the time when I call.

Do you like me because I’m me or because I’m not? Or do you dislike me even without me or not? Or what?

All these sentences and ways of saying nothing are signs that the ex-Ibis, the extinct Ibis, the Ibis that’s kaput and not even happily bonkers, is going to the nuthouse at Telhal or Rilhafolles, and there’s a big party to celebrate his glorious absence.

I need more than ever to go to Cascais—to the Mouth of Hell* but
with teeth
, head first, that’s all, folks, and presto, no more Ibis. That’s just what this animal-bird deserves—to grind its weird head in the ground.

But if Baby would just give him a kiss, then Ibis could stand life for a little longer. Well? There goes the snapped spring—r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r—for good.

Fernando

Pessoa continued to call Ophelia and to meet her in the fleeting circumstances of a streetcar ride or a walk from one part of downtown Lisbon to another, but he wrote no more real letters. In mid-December he sent a note with a baby picture that he had promised Ophelia, and in mid-January of
1930
another note, to accompany a humorous, nonsensical poem. Ophelia kept writing regularly for over another year, expressing occasional satisfaction after her Nininho (as she almost always called Fernando in her letters) had phoned her or they had seen each other, but these times were increasingly rare. Obsessed by Fernando, Ophelia would bitterly but cautiously reproach him for not writing, she occasionally indulged in
gushy descriptions of the married life she fantasized for them, and she frequently blamed the impossibility of that fantasy on Alvaro de Campos, apparently accepting Pessoa’s own shorthand explanation of why he kept so resolutely to himself. In the spring of
1931
Ophelia quit the stream of letters, but she continued to send birthday greetings to Pessoa every June 13, usually by telegram, and he would send a telegram to her on June 14, which was her birthday. In October
1935,
Pessoa wrote his last Álvaro de Campos poem, whose first five stanzas read:

All love letters are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn’t be love letters if they weren’t
Ridiculous
.

In my time I also wrote love letters
Equally, inevitably
Ridiculous
.

Love letters, if there’s love,
Must be
Ridiculous
.

But in fact
Only those who’ve never written
Love letters
Are
Ridiculous
.

If only I could go back
To when I wrote love letters
Without thinking how
Ridiculous
.

Pessoa died one month later, from liver disease or a pancreas inflammation brought on by his steep consumption of alcohol. Ophelia Queiroz, who eventually married, died in
1991.

Conceived early on as a “philosophical follower” of Alberto Caeiro (see Pessoa’s preface to
Aspects
at the front of this volume), Dr. António Mora was part of the inner circle ofheteronyms that met in an imaginary city called Lisbon to read and discuss each other’s work and to exchange ideas. This often led to lively debates, several of which are recorded in Alvaro de Campos’s
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro,
but the philosophical Mora usually preferred just to listen. He was the group’s theoretician, responsible for setting out the doctrines of so-called Neopaganism, the religious system or spirit embedded in the poetry of Reis (the system) and Caeiro (the spirit), and to a much lesser extent that of Campos, whose main religion was his feelings
.

Mora’s ambitious works-in-progress included
The Foundations of Paganism, Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism,
and, most important
, The Return of the Gods.
None of his writings—mostly datable to the second half of the 1910s and the early 1920s—was published in Pessoa’s lifetime, and they are often not labeled, which makes it difficult to know which of his projected works they belong to. Ricardo Reis’s extensive writings on Neopaganism only multiply the confusion, for there are many unsigned passages on the subject that could as easily be credited to Mora as to Reis. Moreover, some passages signed by Reis are labeled
Return of the Gods,
which suggests that Pessoa at one point considered
making him, rather than Mora, the reputed author of this treatise. Or did he think of making them coauthors? And yet Pessoa draws distinctions between the viewpoints of these two heteronyms, as we can see in the third of the four passages that follow
.

Without yet going into the metaphysical foundations of religion in general or of any religion in particular but accepting the sociological finding that humanity needs religious expression to discipline and organize societies, we may affirm, as a corollary, that the best religion for disciplining and organizing societies will be the one that is closest to Nature. Such a religion, because it is closest to Nature, is the one that can act most directly on men, the one that can most effectively induce them not to stray from the basic natural laws that rule human (and indeed all) life, and the one that—since it does not interfere with other human activities—can most stimulate man’s mental and social activity to develop fully and freely.

We can easily show, based on three simple observations, that the pagan religion is the most natural of all.

The pagan religion is, in the first place, polytheistic, even as nature is plural. Nature does not naturally appear to us as an ensemble but as a multiplicity of many different things. We cannot positively affirm, without the intervention of reason or the intelligence in our direct experience, that an ensemble called the Universe actually exists or that there is a unity, a united whole, identifiable as “nature.” Reality, when it first appears to us, is multiple. By referring all received sensations to our individual consciousness, we impose a false unity (false to our experience) on the original multiplicity of things. Now religion, since it comes to us as an outer reality, should agree with the fundamental characteristic of outer reality. That characteristic is the multiplicity of things. The first distinctive characteristic of a natural religion is, therefore, the multiplicity of gods.

The pagan religion is, in the second place, human. The acts of pagan gods are the acts of magnified humans; they are of the same order but on a larger, divine scale. The gods differ from humanity not
by rejecting it but by surpassing it, like demigods. For the pagan, the divine nature is not antihuman as well as superhuman; it is merely superhuman. And so the pagan religion agrees not only with the nature of the outer world but also with the nature of humanity.

Finally, the pagan religion is political, meaning that it forms part of the life of a city or state, without aspiring to be universal. It does not impose itself on other cultures but seeks, instead, to receive from them. It agrees, therefore, with the original principle of civilization as the synthesis, in one nation, of all possible influences from all other nations—a principle violated only by the political provincialism of rigidly nationalist governments and by the decadence embodied in imperialistic ones. Never has there been a strong, conservative nation, nor a healthy nation that was imperialistic. It is those who cannot change that try to impose themselves. It is those who cannot receive that insist on giving. But those who cannot change and those who cannot receive have in fact stagnated.

Thus the pagan religion is in harmony with the three natural spheres of human experience: with the essence of nature as it comes to us; with the essence of humanity itself; and with the essence of human nature in its social progress, or, put more simply, with the essence of civilized human nature, or, simpler still, with the essence of civilization.

The profound saying of Goethe—that a man can do without religion if, and only if, he has science and art—basically means just this: let those who are incapable of a higher art have a lower art. (Or would it be more correct to say that religion is the rudimentary basis for art, science, and morality?) It’s as absurd to expect common people to give up religion as it is to expect them to stop enjoying the theater, since one and the other are art’s rudimentary forms. Art is unsocial; religion is the social form it assumes.