The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (8 page)

FIRST WATCHER
I don’t know ...
(in a low voice, looking at the coffin)
Why do people die?

SECOND WATCHER
Perhaps because they don’t dream enough ...

FIRST WATCHER
It’s possible ... Then wouldn’t we be better off shutting ourselves up in our dream and forgetting life, so that death would in turn forget us? ...

SECOND WATCHER
No, sister, we’re not better off doing anything ...

THIRD WATCHER
Sisters, it’s already day... Look at the astonished line of the hills ... Why don’t we weep? ... That woman who pretends to be lying there was young like us, and beautiful, and she also dreamed ... I’m sure her dream was the most beautiful of all... What do you suppose she dreamed of? ...

FIRST WATCHER
Lower your voice. Perhaps she’s listening, and already knows what dreams are for ...

(pause)

SECOND WATCHER
Perhaps none of this is true ... This silence, this dead woman and this rising day are perhaps nothing but a dream ... Look closely at all this ... Does it seem to you that it belongs to life? ...

FIRST WATCHER
I don’t know. I don’t know how something belongs to life ... Ah, how still you are! And your eyes look so uselessly sad ...

SECOND WATCHER
It’s not worth being sad in any other way ... Don’t you think we should stop talking? It’s so strange to be living ... Everything that happens is unbelievable, whether on the mariner’s island or in this world ... Look, the sky is already green. The horizon goldenly smiles ... I feel my eyes burning from my having thought about crying ...

FIRST WATCHER
You did cry, sister.

SECOND WATCHER
Perhaps... It doesn’t matter... What’s this chill? ... Ah, it’s time, yes... the time has come! ... Tell me this... Tell me this one thing ... Why can’t the mariner be the only thing in all of this that’s real, and we and everything else just one of his dreams? ...

FIRST WATCHER
Stop talking, stop talking ... This is so strange that it must be true. Say no more ... I don’t know what you were going to
say, but it must be too much for the soul to bear ... I’m afraid of what you didn’t say ... Look, look, it’s already day. Look at the day ... Do everything you can to see only the day, the real day, there, outside ... Look at it, look at it ... It comforts ... Don’t think, don’t look at what you’re thinking ... Look at the day that’s breaking ... It shines like gold over a silver land. The wispy clouds are filling out and gaining color ... Imagine if nothing existed, sisters ... Imagine if everything were, in a way, absolutely nothing ... Why did you look at me like that? ...

(They don’t answer her. And no one had looked at anything.)

FIRST WATCHER
What did you say that so frightened me? ... I felt it so strongly I hardly noticed what it was ... Tell me again so that, hearing it for the second time, I won’t be as frightened as the first... No, no ... Don’t say anything ... I didn’t ask that question because I wanted an answer but just to say something, to keep myself from thinking ... I’m afraid I might remember what it was ... It was something huge and frightful like the existence of God ... We should have already quit talking ... Our conversation stopped making sense a long time ago ... Whatever it is between us that makes us talk has gone on for too long ... There are other presences here besides our souls ... The day should have broken, and they should have woken up by now ... Something’s late ... Everything’s late ... What’s happening in things to make us feel this horror? ... Ah, don’t desert me ... Talk to me, talk to me ... Talk at the same time as me so that my voice won’t be alone ... My voice scares me less than the idea of my voice, should I happen to notice that I’m speaking ...

THIRD WATCHER
What voice are you speaking with? ... It’s someone else’s ... It comes from some sort of distance ...

FIRST WATCHER
I don’t know ... Don’t remind me of that... I should be speaking with the shrill and tremulous voice of fear ... But I no longer know how to speak. A chasm has opened between me and my voice ... All our talking and this night and this fear—all this should have ended, abruptly ended, after the horror of your words ... I think
I’ve finally started forgetting the story that you told and that made me feel like I should scream in a new way to express such a horror ...

THIRD WATCHER
(
to the
SECOND WATCHER
) You shouldn’t have told us that story, sister. Now I marvel at being alive with even greater horror. Your story so engrossed me that I heard the meaning of your words and their sound separately. And it seemed to me that you, your voice and the meaning of what you said were three different beings, like three creatures that walk and talk.

SECOND WATCHER
They really are three different beings, each with its own life. Perhaps God knows why ... Ah, but why are we talking? Who makes us keep talking? Why do I talk when I don’t want to? Why don’t we notice that it’s day? ...

FIRST WATCHER
If only someone could scream to wake us up! I hear myself screaming on the inside, but I no longer know the path from my will to my throat. I feel a burning need to be afraid that someone will knock at that door. Why doesn’t someone knock at the door? It would be impossible, and I need to be afraid of that, I need to know what it is I’m afraid of... How strange I feel! ... It seems I’ve stopped speaking with my voice ... Part of me fell asleep and just watches... My dread has grown, but I’m no longer able to feel it... I no longer know where in my soul things are felt... A leaden shroud has been placed over my awareness of my body ... Why did you tell us your story?

SECOND WATCHER
I don’t remember ... I hardly even remember that I told it... It already seems so long ago! ... What a deep sleepiness has fallen over my way of looking at things! ... What is it we want to do? What were we thinking of doing? I can’t remember if it was to talk or not to talk ...

FIRST WATCHER
Let’s stop talking. The effort you make to talk tires me out... The gap between what you think and what you say grieves me ... I can feel in my skin my consciousness floating on the surface of my sensations’ terrified stupor. I don’t know what that means, but it’s what I feel ... I need to say longish, confusing sentences that are hard to say ... Doesn’t all of this feel to you like a huge spider that between us is weaving, from soul to soul, a black web we can’t escape?

SECOND WATCHER
I feel nothing ... My sensations feel like a tangible thing ... Who am I being in this moment? Who is speaking with my voice? ... Ah, listen ...

FIRST
and
THIRD WATCHERS
Who was it?

SECOND WATCHER
Nothing. I heard nothing ... I tried to pretend to hear something so that you might think you’d heard it and I could believe there was something to hear ... Oh, what horror, what secret horror separates voice from soul, sensations from thoughts, and makes us talk and feel and think, when everything in us begs for silence and the new day and the unconsciousness of life ... Who is the fifth person in this room who extends a forbidding hand to stop us every time we’re about to feel?

FIRST WATCHER
Why try to frighten me? I’m already bursting with more fear than I can hold. I already weigh too much in the lap of my self-awareness. I’m completely immersed in the warm mud of what I think I feel. Something that seizes and watches us has entered through all my senses. My eyelids droop over all my sensations. My tongue is stuck to all my feelings. A deep sleep glues all my ideas of gestures together. Why did you look at me like that? ...

THIRD WATCHER
(in a very slow and faint voice)
Ah, it’s time, the time has come ... Yes, someone has woken up ... There are people waking up ... As soon as someone enters, all this will end ... Until then let’s imagine that all this horror was a long sleep we’ve been having... It’s already day . .. Everything’s going to end . .. And the conclusion of all this, sister, is that only you are happy, because you believe in the dream ...

SECOND WATCHER
Why ask me about it? Because I told it? No, I don’t believe ...

A
rooster crows. The light brightens, as if suddenly. The three watchers, without looking at each other, remain silent
.

On a road not far off an indefinite wagon creaks and groans
.

11–12 October, 1913

AFTER READING YOUR STATIC DRAMA
The Mariner

After twelve minutes
Of your play
The Mariner
,
Whose utter lack of meaning
Makes the sharpest of minds
Go dull and grow weary,
One of the watching women
Says with languid magic:

Only dreams last forever and are beautiful. Why are we still talking?

Exactly what I wanted
To ask those women ...

Á
LVARO DE
C
AMPOS

“The creation ofCaeiro and of the discipleship of Reis and Campos seems at first sight, an elaborate joke of the imagination. But it is not. It [is] a great act of intellectual magic, a magnum opus of the impersonal creative power.” So claimed Fernando Pessoa in a note datable to January
1930,
by which time the poet seems to have lost all his modesty. Or could it be that he was just stating a fact? Even if we may doubt that the creation ofCaeiro and his poetic disciples wasn’t, at some level, a hearty as well as elaborate joke, it would be hard to deny the magical quality of Pessoa’s intellectual trick. Having divided himself among invented others, whom he claimed were no longer him, Pessoa could promote them without—theoretically—any personal stake in the matter. And he spared no pains to do just that. Besides all the commentary and praise that he instructed the minor heteronyms to heap on the major ones, and Campos and Reis on Alberto Caeiro (the two “disciples” were rather more critical of each other), Pessoa drew up quite specific plans for publicizing Caeiro’s work in magazines and newspapers, both at home and abroad, and he even drafted some promotional articles. One of these, written in English and headed by a list of the British publications where it was to be sent (including
T. P.’s Weekly, Academy,
and
Athenaeum),
explains to its potential readers:

Was Pessoa really planning to blitz the papers with promotional pieces like this one? Probably so, but planning very far ahead, for he would first have had to publish the book ofCaeiro that they promoted, and he seemed in no hurry to publish anything in the way of books. He seems to have realized that time was on his side, such that none of his efforts would be wasted. And in his literary afterlife, on which he bet everything he had or was, Pessoa’s publicity schemes are indeed having their impact.

As a marketing strategist for himself, Pessoa was (begging Caeiro’s pardon) a veritable master, but the real “intellectual magic” of his enterprise resides in the logic of his psychological alchemies. We are all under the spell of Pessoa’s own explanations of who he was, or wasn’t. He left us not just inspired lines and not just inspired characters that recite inspired lines but a vast inspired system of logically interconnected ideas materialized in a literature of interconnected “Pessoa’s”
(pessoa
means “person” in Portuguese)—a cosmography not just of his multiplied self but of Western thought and philosophy as embodied by those various selves. Such, at least, was Pessoa’s ideal for his system, whose mechanics were perhaps his greatest poetic achievement
.

Pessoa had a definite plan for the book ofCaeiro he never published. In fact he had various plans, but the final and most elaborate one called for a substantial introduction by Ricardo Reis, to be followed by Caeiro’s complete poems
(The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love,
and
Uncollected Poems)
with accompanying notes by Reis, a horoscope for the time of Caeiro’s birth (cast by Fernando Pessoa), and—finishing off the volume—Alvaro de Campos’s
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro.
Most of Reis’s piecemeal but seemingly endless introduction probably dates from the late igios, though passages for it continued to be produced in the twenties. Had it ever been assembled, it would have amounted to a treatise concerned less with presenting Caeiro’s poetry than with explaining
and defending paganism (as shown by excerpts from it found further on in this volume). Campos’s twenty-five or so
Notes,
left in a similar state of expanding disorder, were mostly if not all written in the
1930s,
by which time Fernando Pessoa had taken the final step on his path of ironic self-effacement, declaring that he too was one of Caeiro’s “disciples”