The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (6 page)

The mariner is of course Pessoa, who was notoriously silent about his true past and whose ship blew off course from the world of love and social engagement, depositing him on the isle of his literary imagination. Pessoa is also the Second Watcher, who dreamed up the mariner and the mariner’s dream. And Pessoa is Pessoa, who dreamed the watcher who dreamed the mariner who dreamed a past life that was, perhaps, Pessoa’s
.

Renouncing all action, plot, and progress
, The Mariner
is as much an antidrama as a static one, and Pessoa’s dozens of unfinished plays, including a monumental but vastly disordered
Faust,
have few positively
dramatic
qualities to offer. Describing his life’s work as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts,” Pessoa specialized in inventing characters without true plays (or stories) for them to inhabit, and the larger characters—his heteronyms—ended up haunting him, not because they were convincing replicas of carnal realities but because Pessoa felt, or decided, that their other-world reality had every bit as much right to exist. No matter how ethereal a dreamed thing may be, it is in some sense an object of experience, as real to an unbiased sensibility as any other object, only more mysteriously so. Pessoa escaped from the world of material chaos into dreams, whose more obscure and endlessly proliferating reality proved to be even more disquieting. No wonder the Second Watcher, in the second
half of the play, desperately pleads with her two companions: “Talk to me, shout at me, so that I’ll wake up and know that I’m here with you and that certain things really are just dreams
....”

She pleads in vain. No dream, for Pessoa, was
just
a dream; every dream, every fiction, every vision, every passing thought, was its own small but infinite universe, full of unknown wonders—and horrors—for the adventurer who dares to explore it. Pessoa would never have said that truth is stranger than fiction. What he did say was that truth is fiction, fiction is truth, and that everything—when we really look at it—is strange beyond all telling
.

By “static drama” I mean drama in which action is absent from the plot, drama in which the characters don’t act (for they never change position and never talk of changing position) and don’t even have feelings capable of producing an action—drama, in other words, in which there is no conflict or true plot. Someone may argue that this is not drama at all. I believe it is, for I believe that drama is more than just the dynamic kind and that the essence of dramatic plot is not action or the results of action but—more broadly—the revelation of souls through the words that are exchanged and the creation of situations. ...... It’s possible for souls to be revealed without action, and it’s possible to create situations of inertia that concern only the soul, with no windows or doors onto reality.*

A room in what is no doubt an old castle. We can tell, from the room, that the castle is circular. In the middle of the room, on a bier, stands a coffin with a young woman dressed in white. A torch bums in each of the four comers. To the right, almost opposite whoever imagines the room, there is one long, narrow window, from which a patch of ocean can be glimpsed between two distant hills
.

Next to the window three young women keep watch. The first is sitting opposite the window, her back to the torch on the upper right. The other two are seated on either side of the window
.

It is night, with just a hazy remnant of moonlight

FIRST WATCHER
We still haven’t heard the hour strike.

SECOND WATCHER
We can’t hear it. No clock is near. Soon it will be day.

THIRD WATCHER
No: the horizon is black.

FIRST WATCHER
Why don’t we amuse ourselves by telling what we once were? It’s beautiful, sister, and always false ...

SECOND WATCHER
No, let’s not talk about it. Besides, were we ever anything?

FIRST WATCHER
Perhaps. I don’t know. But it’s always beautiful, in any case, to talk about the past ... The hours have gone by and we have remained silent. I’ve passed the time gazing at the flame of that candle. Sometimes it flickers, or turns yellow, or more white. I don’t know why this happens. But do we know, sisters, why anything happens? ...

(pause)

FIRST WATCHER
To talk about the past must be beautiful, for it is useless and makes us feel so sorry ...

SECOND WATCHER
Let’s talk, if you like, about a past we may never have had.

THIRD WATCHER
No. Perhaps we had it.

FIRST WATCHER
You’re saying nothing but words. Talking is so sad—such a false way of forgetting! ... How about if we go for a walk?

THIRD WATCHER
Where?

FIRST WATCHER
Here, back and forth. Sometimes this brings dreams.

THIRD WATCHER
Of what?

FIRST WATCHER
I don’t know. Why should I know?

(pause)

SECOND WATCHER
This land is so sad ... It was less sad in the land where I used to live. At day’s end I spun thread by the window. The
window looked out onto the sea, where sometimes I could spot an island in the distance ... Sometimes I didn’t spin; I looked at the sea and forgot to live. I don’t know if I was happy. I’ll never go back to being what perhaps I never was ...

FIRST WATCHER
I’ve never seen the sea except from here. And we see so little of it from that window, which is the only one through which we can see it at all ... Is the sea of other lands beautiful?

SECOND WATCHER
Only the sea of other lands is beautiful. The sea we can see always makes us long for the one we’ll never see.

(pause)

FIRST WATCHER
Didn’t we say we were going to tell our past?

SECOND WATCHER
No, we didn’t.

THIRD WATCHER
Why is there no clock in this room?

SECOND WATCHER
I don’t know ... But this way, with no clock, everything is more distant and mysterious. The night belongs more to itself ... Perhaps, if we knew what time it is, we couldn’t talk like this.

FIRST WATCHER
In me, sister, everything is sad. It’s December in my soul ... I’m trying not to look at the window, through which I know hills can be seen in the distance ... I was once happy beyond some hills ... I was a little girl. Every day I picked flowers and asked, before going to sleep, that they not be taken from me ... There’s something about this that’s irreparable and that makes me feel like crying ... This happened—it could only have happened—far away from here ... When will the day dawn? ...

THIRD WATCHER
What does it matter? It always dawns in the same way ... Always, always, always ...

(pause)

SECOND WATCHER
Let’s tell each other stories. I don’t know any stories, but there’s no harm in that ... Only life is harmful ... Better not even to brush it with the hems of our dresses ... No, don’t get up. That would be an action, and every action interrupts a dream ... I wasn’t having a dream right now, but it’s nice to imagine that I could have been ... But the past—why don’t we talk about the past?

FIRST WATCHER
We decided not to ... Soon day will break, and we’ll regret it. Daylight puts dreams to sleep ... The past is just a dream. I can think of nothing, for that matter, that isn’t a dream ... If I look closely at the present, it seems to have already moved on ... What is anything? How does it move on from one moment to the next? How does it inwardly move on? ... Oh let’s talk, sisters, let’s talk all together in a loud voice ... Silence is beginning to take shape, to be a thing ... I feel it wrapping me like a mist ... Ah, talk, talk! ...

SECOND WATCHER
What for? ... I stare at you both and don’t see you right away ... Chasms seem to have opened between us ... To be able to see you I have to wear out the idea that I can see you ... This warm air feels cold inside, in the part that touches my soul... Right now I should be feeling impossible hands running through my hair—that’s the image people use when talking about mermaids...
(Pauses, crossing her hands on her knees.)
Just now, when I wasn’t thinking about anything, I was thinking about my past.

FIRST WATCHER
And I must have been thinking about mine ...

THIRD WATCHER
I don’t know what I was thinking about... Perhaps about the past of others..., the past of wondrous people who never existed ... Not far from my mother’s house flowed a stream. Why did it flow, and why didn’t it flow farther away, or nearer? ... Is there any reason for anything being what it is? Is there any reason that’s true and real like my hands? ...

SECOND WATCHER
Our hands are not true or real. They’re mysteries that inhabit our life ... Sometimes, staring at my hands, I fear God ... No wind makes the candles flutter, but look: they flutter. Toward what? ... What a pity if someone could answer! ... I feel like listening to exotic melodies which at this very moment are surely playing in palaces on other continents ... In my heart everything is always far away ... Perhaps because I chased the waves at the seashore when I was a child. I led life by the hand among the rocks at low tide, when the ocean seems to have crossed its hands on its chest and fallen asleep, like the statue of an angel, so that no one will ever look at it again ...

THIRD WATCHER
Your words remind me of my soul ...

SECOND WATCHER
Perhaps because they’re not true ... I hardly realize. Im saying them. I repeat what a voice I don’t hear tells me ... But I must have really lived by the seashore ... I love things that wave this way or that. There are waves in my soul. I seem to rock when I walk ... I feel like walking right now. I don’t do it, because nothing’s worth doing, especially when it’s something we feel like doing ... The hills are what I fear... They can’t possibly be so large and still. They must have a stony secret they refuse to tell ... If I could lean out that window without seeing hills, then someone in whom I feel happy would, for a moment, lean out of my soul ...

FIRST WATCHER
I myself love the hills ... On this side of all hills life is always ugly ... On the other side, where my mother lives, we used to sit in the shade of tamarind trees and talk about going to other lands . .. There everything was long and happy like the song of two birds, one on either side of the path ... Our thoughts were the only clearings in the forest. And our dreams were that the trees would cast some other calm besides their shadows on the ground ... Surely that was how we lived—I and I don’t know if anyone else ... Tell me this was true so that I won’t have to cry ...

SECOND WATCHER
I lived among rocks in plain view of the sea ... The hem of my skirt whipped cool and salty against my bare legs... I was small and wild ... Today I’m afraid of having been ... I seem to sleep through the present... Speak to me of fairies. I’ve never heard anyone speak of them . .. The ocean was too big to ever make me think of them ... It’s cozier in life to be small... Were you happy, sister?

FIRST WATCHER
I’m beginning, in this moment, to have been so ... Then too, it all happened in the shade ... The trees lived it more than I did ... It never arrived, and I hardly expected it to ... And you, sister, why don’t you speak?

THIRD WATCHER
It horrifies me that I’ll soon have said what I’m going to say. My words, spoken in the present, will belong immediately to the past, they’ll be somewhere outside me, irrevocable and fatal ... When speaking, I think about what’s going on in my throat, and my words seem like people ... My fear is larger than me. I can feel in my hand, I don’t know how, the key to an unknown door. And I’m
suddenly, all of me, a talisman or tabernacle conscious of itself. That’s why it so scares me, like a dark forest, to pass through the mystery of speaking ... But who knows if this is really how I am and what I feel? ...

FIRST WATCHER
It’s so hard to know what we feel when we look at ourselves! Even living seems hard when we stop to think about it ... Speak, therefore, without thinking about the fact you exist. Weren’t you going to tell us who you once were?