The great organism in which every act of piracy ever
committed
Would be a conscious cell, and all of me would spin
As a huge, rocking putridity, embodying all of this!
The feverish machine of my teeming visions
Now spins at such frightening, inordinate speed
That my flywheel consciousness
Is just a blurry circle whirring in the air.
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Hey-la-oh-la-oh-la-OH- - - - la-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah- - - - ah-ah-ah . . .
Ah! the savagery of this savagery! To hell
With every life like ours, which has none of this!
Look at me: an engineer! Necessarily practical, sensitive to
everything,
Static in comparison to you, even when I walk;
Inert, even when I act; weak, even when I assert myself;
Stagnant, shattered, a fainthearted renegade of your Glory,
Of your shrill, hot and bloody dynamic!
Damn my inability to turn my delirium into action!
Damn my always hanging on to civilization’s apron strings!
Damn the dainty manners I carry on my back like a bale of
lace!
Errand boys of modern humanitarianism—that’s what we
all are!
A sorry lot of consumptives, neurasthenics, and phlegmatics,
Without the courage to be violent and daring men,
Our souls tied up like a chicken by the leg!
Ah, pirates! pirates!
The yearning for lawlessness coupled with brutality,
The yearning for absolutely cruel and abominable things,
Gnawing like an abstract lust at our delicate bodies,
At our squeamish and effeminate nerves,
And bringing mad fevers into our empty gazes!
Make me kneel down before you!
Beat and humiliate me!
Make me your slave and your plaything!
And don’t ever deprive me of your contempt!
O my masters! O my lords!
To always gloriously take the submissive part
In bloody deeds and endless sensualities!
Fall on me like massive walls,
O barbarians of the ancient sea!
Rip me and wound me!
Streak my body with blood
From east to west!
Kiss with cutlasses, whips and rage
My blissful carnal fear of belonging to you,
My masochistic yearning to submit to your fury,
To be the sentient, impassive object of your omnivorous
cruelty,
Rulers, lords, emperors, pirates!
Ah, torture me,
Rip me apart!
And once I’ve been hacked into conscious pieces,
Strew me over the decks,
Scatter me across the waters, leave me
On the voracious beaches of islands!
Satiate in me all my mysticism of you!
Engrave my soul in blood!
Cut and slash!
O tattooers of my bodily imagination!
Beloved flayers of my fleshly submission!
Subdue me like a dog that’s kicked to death!
Make me the vessel of your lordly disdain!
Make me all your victims!
As Christ suffered for all men, I want to suffer
For all who’ve been victims at your hands,
Your callused and bloody hands, with fingers lopped off
In sudden attacks at the gunwales!
Make me into something that’s dragged
—O pleasure, O beloved pain!—
As if behind horses whipped by you . . .
But all this at sea, at se-e-e-ea, at SE-E-E-E-EA!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! HEY-EY-EY-EY-
EY-EY-EY! At S-E-E-E-EA!
Yey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Yey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Yey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-
ey-ey!
Everything shouts out! Every last thing shouts! Winds, waves,
boats,
Seas, topsails, pirates, my heart, blood, and the air, the air!
Hey-ey-ey-ey! Yey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Yey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Everything
shouts out in song!
FIFTEEN MEN ON A DEAD MAN’S CHEST. YO-HO-HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-
ey-ey-ey!
Hey-la-oh-la-oh-la-OH-O-O-o-o-la-ah-ah-ah----ah-ah-ah!
AHO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O---yyy!...
SCHOONER AHO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O----yyy!...
Darby M’Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw!
DARBY M’GRAW-AW-AW-AW-AW-AW-AW!
FETCH A-A-AFT THE RU-U-U-U-U-UM, DARBY!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
HEY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY!
HEY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY!
HEY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY!
HEY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY-EY!
Something in me snaps. The red has turned to dusk.
I felt too much to be able to keep on feeling.
My soul is spent, only an echo in me remains.
The flywheel is slowing down.
My dreams lift their hands a bit from my eyes.
There’s nothing in me but a void, a desert, a nocturnal sea.
And as soon as I feel this nocturnal sea in me,
Then again, yet again, from out of the silence
Of its endless distance, the vast and age-old cry arises.
Like a lightning flash of sound—soothing, not noisy—
Suddenly encompassing all the wet maritime
Horizon and dark human surging in the night,
Like the voice of a distant siren weeping, calling, it rises
From the depths of the Far, the depths of the Sea, the heart
of the Abyss,
And on the surface, like seaweed, float my broken
dreams . . .
Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yy . . .
Schooner aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yy . . .
Ah, the freshness of dew on my exhilaration!
The coolness of night on my inner ocean!
Everything in me suddenly beholds a night at sea
Full of the vast and utterly human mystery of the nocturnal
waves.
The moon rises on the horizon
And my happy childhood wells up in me like a tear.
My past resurfaces, as if that mariner’s cry
Were a scent, a voice, the echo of a song
Calling up from my past
That happiness I’ll never again know.
It was in the old peaceful house by the river . . .
(My bedroom windows, like the dining room windows,
Looked out over some low-lying houses and, just beyond
them, the river,
The Tagus, this very same Tagus but at a point further down.
If today I gazed out the same windows, I wouldn’t gaze out
the same windows.
That time has passed like smoke from a steamer on the high
sea . . . )
An inexplicable feeling of tenderness,
A tearful and heartfelt remorse,
For all those victims—especially the children—
I dreamed of hurting when I dreamed I was a pirate of
old . . .
A feeling of regret, since they were my victims;
A soft and tender feeling, since they weren’t really.
A confused emotion, bluish like a fogged window,
Sings old songs in my poor grieving heart.
Ah, how could I think or dream those things?
How far I am from what I was a few minutes ago!
What hysterical feelings—first one thing, then the opposite!
As the blond morning rises, funny how my ears hear only
&n
bsp; Things that concur with this emotion—the lapping of
the waters,
The river water’s gentle lapping against the wharf . . . ,
The sailboat passing along the river’s far shore,
The distant, Japanese-blue hills,
The houses of Almada,
And whatever’s soft and childlike in the early morning
hours! . . .
A seagull passes by
And my tenderness increases.
But all this time I wasn’t paying any attention.
All those things I felt were only skin-deep, like a caress.
All this time I never took my eyes off my distant dream,
My house by the river,
My childhood by the river,
My bedroom windows looking out onto the river at night,
And the peace of the moonlight scattered over the waters!
My old aunt, who loved me because of the son she’d lost . . .
My old aunt used to sing me to sleep
(Even though I was already too old for this).
The memory makes tears fall on my heart, cleansing it
of life,
And a light sea breeze wafts inside me.
Sometimes she sang “The Good Ship Catrineta”:
There goes the Catrineta
Over the waves of the sea . . .
And at other times it was “The Fair Princess,” with its
wistful,
Medieval melody . . . I recall this, and her poor old voice
rises in me,
Reminding me how little I’ve thought of her since then, and
she loved me so much!
How ungrateful I’ve been to her—and what have I done with
my life?
Yes, “The Fair Princess” . . . I’d close my eyes as she sang:
The Fair Princess
Sat in her garden . . .
And I’d open my eyes just a sliver, see the window full
of moonlight,
And shut them again, and in all of this I was happy.
The Fair Princess
Sat in her garden
Combing her hair
With her golden comb . . .
O my childhood days, a doll someone broke!
If I could only go back in time, to that house and that
affection,
And remain there forever, forever a child and forever happy!
But all of this is the Past, a lantern on an old street corner.
To remember it makes me cold, and hungry for something
unobtainable.
To think of it makes me feel an absurd regret for I don’t
know what.
O slow whirlpool of conflicting sensations!
Faint vertigo of confused things in my soul!
Shattered furies, tender feelings like spools of thread children
play with,
Avalanches of imagination over the eyes of my senses,
Tears, useless tears,
Light breezes of contradiction grazing my soul . . .
To shake off this emotion, I invoke with a conscious effort,
I invoke with a desperate, worthless, arid effort
The song of the Great Pirate as he was dying:
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
But the song is a straight line drawn crookedly inside me . . .
With a struggle I’m able, but through an almost literary
imagination,
To bring back into my soul’s field of vision
The rage of piracy, of slaughter, the almost mouth-watering
appetite for pillage,
For the frivolous slaughter of women and children,
For the gratuitous torture of poorer passengers, merely to
amuse ourselves,
And the sensuality of breaking and shattering the things
others most cherish,
But I dream all this while dreading something breathing
down my neck.
I remember how interesting it would be
To hang sons before their mothers’ eyes
(But I can’t help but feel like the mothers),
To bury alive four-year-old children on desert isles,
Taking their parents there in boats to see
(But I shudder, remembering the son I don’t have who’s
quietly sleeping at home).
I try to stir a dead yearning for sea crimes,
For an inquisition without the excuse of Faith,
Crimes without even any wrath or malice behind them,
Carried out mechanically, not to hurt, not to harm
And not even to amuse ourselves, but just to pass
the time,
Like country people who play solitaire at the dining table
after dinner, with the tablecloth pushed to one side,
Just for the soothing pleasure of committing heinous crimes
and thinking nothing of it,
Of watching suffering victims reach the brink of madness
and death-from-pain without letting them cross it . . .
But my imagination refuses to go along.
And suddenly, more suddenly than before, from farther away
and deeper down,
Suddenly—oh the terror coursing through my veins!
Oh the sudden cold from the door to Mystery which opened
in me and let in a draft!—
I remember God, the Transcendent in life, and suddenly
The old voice of the English sailor Jim Barnes, whom I used
to talk with,
Becomes in me the voice of my mysterious affection for silly
things like a mother’s lap and a sister’s hair ribbon,
A voice arriving miraculously from beyond the appearance
of things,
The faint and remote Voice that’s now the Absolute Voice,
the Mouthless Voice,
Arriving from above and from within the seas’ nocturnal
solitude,
Calling me, calling me, calling me . . .
It comes faintly, as if muffled but still audible,
From far away, as if it sounded elsewhere and couldn’t be
heard here,
Like a stifled sob, a snuffed flame, a silent breath,
From no corner in space, from no place in time,
The eternal cry of night, the deep and confused murmur:
Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - yyy . . . . . .
Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyy . . . . . . . . .
Schooner aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - - yy . . . . . .
A cold chill from the soul makes my whole body shiver,
And I suddenly open my eyes, which I hadn’t closed.
Ah, how good to emerge once and for all from my dreams!
To return to the real world, so easy on the nerves!
The world on this early morning when the day’s first
steamers are arriving . . .
I’m no longer interested in the incoming steamer from
before. It’s still far away.
Only what’s close now cleanses my soul.
My healthy, rugged, pragmatic imagination
Is concerned now only with useful, modern things,
With freighters, steamers and passengers,
With rugged, immediate, modern, commercial, real things.
The flywheel in me is slowing down.
Wonderful modern maritime life—
Clean, fit, and full of machines!
All so well ordered, so spontaneously organized,
All the machine parts, all oceangoing vessels,
All aspects of import and export trade activity
So perfectly integrated
That everything seems to happen by natural laws,
Nothing ever colliding with anything else!
Not
hing has lost its poetry. And now there are also machines
With their poetry, and this entirely new kind of life,
This commercial, worldly, intellectual and sentimental life
Which the machine age has conferred on our souls.
Voyages are as lovely as they ever were,
And a ship will always be lovely, just because it is a ship.
Travel is still travel, and the faraway is where it has
always been:
Nowhere at all, thank God!
The ports full of every kind of steamer!
Large and small, of various colors, their portholes variously
arranged,
And belonging to so wonderfully many shipping lines!
Steamers in port, so individual in their separate berths!
So attractive in their stately calm of commercial things that
ply the sea,
The ancient and forever Homeric sea, O Ulysses!
The humanitarian glance of lighthouses far off in the night!
Or the sudden flashing of a nearby lighthouse on a dark
dark night
(“How close we were to the coast!” And the sound of the
water sings in our ear!) . . .
All this is as it always was, but today there’s commerce,
And the commercial destiny of the great steamers
Makes me proud of my era!
The variety of people aboard passenger ships
Fills me with the modern pride of living at a time when it’s
so easy
For races to mix together and distances to be crossed, so easy
to see everything
And enjoy life, making a good number of dreams come true.
Neat, orderly and modern like an office with service