The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (46 page)

How I would diminish before my own eyes and, in truth, before everything and everyone, were I to say right now that the spring is sad, that the flowers suffer, that the rivers lament, that there’s anguish and anxiety in the farm workers’ song, and all because Álvaro Coelho de Athayde, the fourteenth Baron of Teive, realized with regret that he can’t write the books he wanted to!

I confine to myself the tragedy that’s mine. I suffer it, but I suffer it face to face, without metaphysics or sociology. I admit that I’m conquered by life, but not humbled by it.

Many people have tragedies, and if we count the incidental ones, then all people do. But it’s up to everyone who’s a man not to speak of his tragedy, and it’s up to everyone who’s an artist either to be a man and keep his trouble to himself, writing or singing about other things, or to extract from it—with lofty determination—a universal lesson.

I feel I have attained the full use of my reason. And that’s why I’m going to kill myself.

A gladiator whose fate as a slave condemned him to the arena, I take my bow, without fearing the Caesar who’s in this circus surrounded by stars. I bow low, without pride, since a slave has nothing to be proud of, and without joy, since a man condemned to die can hardly smile. I bow so as not to fail the law, which so completely failed me. But having taken my bow, I drive into my chest the sword that won’t serve me in combat.

If the conquered man is the one who dies and the conqueror the one who kills, then by this act, admitting that I’m conquered, I make myself a conqueror.

Fictions of the Interlude,
which served as a title for a small group of poems published under Pessoa’s own name in
1917,
was also—toward the end of his life—the working title for the series of heteronymic books that he had previously called
Aspects.
The “interlude” of the new title corresponds, perhaps, to the one described in the penultimate paragraph of Text
348
of
The Book of Disquiet.
The “fictions” are the heteronyms. Both words of course have other, no doubt pertinent, meanings. This preface, like the preface to
Aspects
and like virtually all of Pessoa’s many prefaces, was left as an incomplete set of unlinked passages, two of which are published here
.

I place certain of my literary characters in stories, or in the subtitles of books, signing my name to what they say; others I project totally, with my only signature being the acknowledgment that I created them. The two types of characters may be distinguished as follows: in those that stand absolutely apart, the very style in which they write is different from my own and, when the case warrants, even contrary to it; in the characters whose works I sign my name to, the style differs from mine only in those inevitable details that serve to distinguish them from each other.

I will compare some of these characters to show, through example, what these differences involve. The assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares and the Baron of Teive—both are me-ishly extraneous characters—write with the same basic style, the same grammar, and the same careful diction. In other words, they both write with the style that, good or bad, is my own. I compare them because they are two instances of the very same
phenomenon—an inability to adapt to real life—motivated by the very same causes. But although the Portuguese is the same in the Baron of Teive and in Bernardo Soares, their styles differ. That of the aristocrat is intellectual, without images, a bit—how shall I put it?—stiff and constrained, while that of his middle-class counterpart is fluid, participating in music and painting but not very architectural. The nobleman thinks clearly, writes clearly, and controls his emotions, though not his feelings; the bookkeeper controls neither emotions nor feelings, and what he thinks depends on what he feels.

There are also notable similarities between Bernardo Soares and Álvaro de Campos. But in Álvaro de Campos we are immediately struck by the carelessness of his Portuguese and by his exaggerated use of images, more instinctive and less purposeful than in Soares.

In my efforts to distinguish one from another, there are lapses that weigh on my sense of psychological discernment. When I try to distinguish, for example, between a musical passage of Bernardo Soares and a similar passage of my own....

Sometimes I can do it automatically, with a perfection that astonishes me; and there’s no vanity in my astonishment, since, not believing in even a smidgen of human freedom, I’m no more astonished by what happens in me than I would be by what happens in someone else—both are perfect strangers.

Only a formidable intuition can serve as a compass on the vast expanses of the soul. Only with a sensibility that freely uses the intelligence without being contaminated by it, although the two function together as one, is it possible to distinguish the separate realities of these imaginary characters.

These derivative personalities, or rather, these different inventions of personalities, fall into two categories or degrees, which the attentive reader will easily be able to identify by their distinctive characteristics. In the first category, the personality is distinguished by feelings and ideas which I don’t share. At the lower level within this category, the personality is distinguished only by ideas, which are placed in rational exposition
or argument and are clearly not my own, at least not so far as I know. “The Anarchist Banker” is an example of this lower level;
The Book of Disquiet
, and the character Bernardo Soares, represent the higher level.

The reader will note that, although I’m publishing
The Book of Disquiet
under the name of a certain Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, I have not included it in these
Fictions of the Interlude
. This is because Bernardo Soares, while differing from me in his ideas, his feelings, and his way of seeing and understanding, expresses himself in the same way I do. His is a different personality, but expressed through my natural style, with the only distinguishing feature being the particular tone that inevitably results from the particularity of his emotions.

In the authors of
Fictions of the Interlude
, it’s not only their ideas and feelings that differ from mine; their technique of composition, their very style, is different from mine. Each of these authors is not just conceived differently but created as a wholly different entity. That’s why poetry predominates here. In prose it is harder to other oneself.

Maria José

Among the dozens of names under which Fernando Pessoa wrote and which, in a certain way, wrote Pessoa, there was one female persona, called Maria Jose. The letter attributed to her was typed on three and a half pages, but Pessoa-Maria signed her name next to the title. One of the striking features of the letter is the language, for Pessoa succeeds in rendering the simple but long-winded diction characteristic of Maria Jose’s economically disadvantaged social class. He also reveals, in spite of his oft-declared disinterest in matters of love and sexuality, a remarkable capacity to evoke a woman’s hopeless love for a man
.

Dear Senhor António,

You won’t ever read this letter, and I’ll probably never read over what I’ve written, because I’m dying of TB, but I have to write you what I feel or I’ll burst.

You don’t know who I am, or rather, you know but it’s like you didn’t know. You’ve seen me look at you from my window when you pass by on your way to the metalworks, because I know when you’re going to pass by, and I wait for you. I doubt you’ve ever given a second thought to the hunchback girl who lives on the second floor of the yellow building, but I never stop thinking about you. I know you have a girlfriend—that tall and pretty blonde. I envy her but I’m not jealous, because I have no rights over you, not even the right to be jealous. I like you because I like you, and I wish I were a different woman, with a different body and a different
personality, so that I could go down to the street and talk to you, because even if you didn’t give me the time of day, I’d still love to meet you and talk.

You’re all I have to keep me going in my sickness, and I’m grateful to you, though you have no idea. I could never be liked in the way people who have likable bodies are liked, but I have the right to like others without being liked back, and I also have the right to cry, because that’s a right that everyone has.

I’d like to talk to you just once and then die, but I’ll never have the guts or the means to talk to you. I’d like you to know how much I like you, but I’m afraid that if you knew, it would mean nothing to you, and it’s so sad to feel certain that this would be the case before finding out if it’s the case that I’ll never even try to find out.

I was born a hunchback and have always been laughed at. Hunchbacked girls are supposed to be wicked, but I never tried to harm anyone. And besides, I’m sick, so that I don’t even have the strength to get really angry. I’m nineteen years old and don’t know why on earth I’ve lived this long. I’m sick, and nobody feels sorry for me unless it’s because I’m a hunchback, which is the least of my troubles, for it’s my soul that hurts and not my body, because the hunchback doesn’t cause any pain.

I’d even like to know all about how your life is with your girlfriend, precisely because it’s a life I can never have, especially now that my life is almost over.

Excuse me for writing so much when I don’t know you, but you won’t read this, and even if you did, you wouldn’t realize it’s to you, or you wouldn’t care, but I wish you’d think for a minute of how sad it is to be a hunchback who always sits next to the window and nobody likes her except her mother and sisters, but that doesn’t count because they have to, they’re family, that’s the least they can do for a doll with her bones turned inside out, which is how I once heard someone describe me.

One morning, when you were on your way to the metalworks, a cat was scuffling with a dog across the street from my window, and we were all watching, and you stopped to watch too, next to Manuel
das Barbas, in front of the corner barber, and you suddenly looked up at my window and saw me laughing and you laughed too, and that’s the only time we were ever alone together, so to speak, or as alone together as I could ever hope for.

You have no idea how often I’ve dreamed of something else like that happening as you’re passing by, so that I might again watch you as you watch, and maybe you’d look up at me and I could look at you and see your eyes gaze straight into mine.

But I never get what I want, that’s how I was born, and I even have to have a kind of platform beneath my chair to be able to see out the window. I spend all day looking at the illustrations in fashion magazines that people lend to my mother, and I’m always thinking about something else, so that when they ask me what a certain skirt looked like or who was in the picture with the Queen of England, I often blush because I don’t know, because I was seeing things that are impossible and that I can’t let into my head and make me smile or I’ll just end up wanting to cry.

Then everyone forgives me, and they think I’m silly, but not stupid, because nobody thinks I’m stupid, and I don’t mind that they think I’m silly, since it saves me from having to explain why I was distracted.

I still remember the day when you passed by on a Sunday in a light blue suit. It wasn’t light blue, but it was much lighter than the dark blue that a suit made of serge usually is. You looked like the day itself, which was beautiful, and I’ve never envied everybody else as much as on that day. But I didn’t envy your girlfriend, if she’s the one you were on your way to see and not some other girl, because I was thinking only about you, and that’s why I envied everybody, which doesn’t make much sense, but that’s how it was.

It’s not because I’m hunchbacked that I’m always sitting by the window but because I also have a kind of arthritis in my legs that prevents me from moving, so that I’m practically a cripple, which makes me an awful nuisance for everyone who lives here. You can’t imagine what it’s like to know that everyone puts up with you just because they have to, and sometimes it gets me so depressed I could
almost jump out the window, but think of what kind of a sight that would make! Even those who saw me jump would laugh, and the window’s so low that I wouldn’t even die, so that I’d be even more of a nuisance to others, and I can just see myself flailing on the street like a monkey, with my legs in the air and my hunchback poking out of my blouse, and everyone wanting to pity me but also feeling repulsed or maybe even laughing, because people are how they are and not how they want to be.

You go back and forth and have no idea how awful it feels to be absolutely nobody. All day long I sit at the window and see people go back and forth, fast or slow, talking to this person or that person, enjoying life, and I’m like a flowerpot with a withered plant, forgotten in the window, waiting to be taken away.

You can’t imagine, because you’re handsome and healthy, what it’s like to be born but not exist and to read in the newspapers what people do, and some are ministers who go back and forth to this country and that country, others are in high society and marry, go to baptisms, get sick and are all operated on by the same doctors, others have houses here, houses there, others steal and others bring charges, and some commit terrible crimes, and there are articles and pictures and advertisements with the names of the people who go abroad to buy the latest fashions, and you can’t imagine what all this is like for someone who’s like a rag that got left on the recently painted win-dowsill where it was used to wipe the round marks left by flowerpots from when they got watered.

If you realized all this, then maybe you would occasionally wave at me, and I wish it were possible to ask you to do just that, because you don’t realize. It probably wouldn’t make me live any longer, and I don’t have much longer to live, but I’d go more happily to where we’re all going if I knew that you sometimes waved at me.