In a corner of the waiting area on the other side of the tracks.
To be found by an employee once the train has departed—
“And this? Doesn’t this belong to a fellow who just left?”
To remain and merely think of departing,
To remain and be right,
To remain and die less . . .
I go to the future as to a difficult exam.
And if the train never comes and God takes pity on me?
I see myself in the station that until now was just a metaphor.
I’m a perfectly presentable person.
You can tell—they say—that I’ve lived abroad.
I have the manners of an obviously well-bred man.
I grab my suitcase, rejecting the porter like a harmful vice,
And both hand and suitcase tremble.
To depart!
I’ll never return,
I’ll never return because there is no return.
The place one returns to is always different,
The station one returns to is never the same.
The people are different, the light is different, the philosophy
is different.
To depart! My God, to depart! I’m afraid of departing! . . .
We crossed paths on a downtown Lisbon street, and he came
up to me
In his shabby clothes, with Professional Beggar written all
over his face,
Drawn to me by some affinity that I also feel for him,
And with a broad, effusive gesture I reciprocally gave him all
I had
(Except, of course, what was in the pocket where I keep more
money:
I’m no fool, nor a zealous Russian novelist,
Just a Romantic, and that in moderation . . . ).
I feel sympathy for people like him,
Especially when they don’t deserve sympathy.
Yes, I too am a beggar and a bum,
And likewise through no one’s fault but my own.
To be a beggar and a bum doesn’t mean you’re a beggar and
a bum:
It means you’re unconnected to the social ladder,
It means you’re unadaptable to life’s norms,
To life’s real or sentimental norms—
It means you’re not a High Court judge, a nine to five
employee, or a whore,
Not genuinely poor or an exploited worker,
Not sick with an incurable disease,
Not thirsty for justice, or a cavalry officer,
Not, in short, within any of those social categories depicted
by novelists
Who pour themselves out on paper because they have good
reasons for shedding tears
And who rebel against society because their good reasons
make them think they’re rebels.
No: anything but having good reasons!
Anything but caring about humanity!
Anything but giving in to humanitarianism!
What good is a feeling if there’s an external reason for it?
Yes, being a beggar and a bum like me
Isn’t just being a beggar and a bum, which is commonplace;
It’s being a bum by virtue of being isolated in your soul,
It’s being a beggar because you have to beg the days to go by
and leave you alone.
All the rest is stupid, like Dostoyevsky or Gorky.
All the rest is going hungry or having no clothes.
And even if this happens, it happens to so many people
That it’s not worth the trouble to trouble over those it
happens to.
I’m a beggar and a bum in the truest sense, namely the
figurative sense,
And I’m wallowing in heartfelt compassion for myself.
Poor Álvaro de Campos!
So isolated in life! So depressed!
Poor guy, sunken in the armchair of his melancholy!
Poor guy, who this very day, with (genuine) tears in his eyes
And with a broad, liberal, Muscovite gesture,
Gave all he had—from the pocket where he had little—
To that poor man who wasn’t poor, who had professionally
sad eyes.
Poor Álvaro de Campos, whom nobody cares about!
Poor Álvaro, who feels so sorry for himself!
Yes, the poor guy!
Poorer than many who are bums and bum around
Or who are beggars and beg,
Because the human soul is an abyss.
I should know. Poor guy!
How splendid to be able to rebel at rallies in my soul!
But I’m no fool!
And I don’t have the excuse of being socially concerned.
I have no excuse at all: I’m lucid.
Don’t try to persuade me otherwise: I’m lucid.
It’s like I said: I’m lucid.
Don’t talk to me about aesthetics with a heart: I’m lucid.
Shit! I’m lucid.
HOLIDAY RETREAT
The stillness of night in this mountain retreat . . .
The stillness that intensifies
The watchdogs’ scattered barking in the night . . .
The silence, accentuated
By a slight buzzing or rustling of something in the
darkness . . .
Ah, how oppressive all this is!
As oppressive as being happy!
What an idyllic life this would be for somebody else,
With this monotonous buzz or rustle of nothing
Beneath the star-studded sky,
With the barking of dogs punctuating the vast stillness!
I came to rest up,
But I forgot to leave myself at home.
I brought along the deep-seated thorn of consciousness,
The vague nausea, the ill-defined affliction of self-awareness.
Always this anxiety chewed bit by bit,
Like dry dark bread that crumbles and falls.
Always this uneasiness swallowed in bitter sips,
Like the wine of a drunkard not even nausea can deter.
Always, always, always
This poor circulation in my soul,
This blacking out of my sensations,
This . . .
Your slender hands, somewhat pale and somewhat my own,
Lay perfectly still in your lap that day,
As the scissors and thimble of another girl might lie.
You sat there lost in thought, looking at me as into space.
(I remember this so as to have something to think about
without thinking.)
Suddenly, half sighing, you interrupted what you were being.
You consciously looked at me and said:
“It’s a pity every day can’t be like this.”
Like that day that wasn’t anything . . .
Ah, you didn’t know,
Fortunately you didn’t know,
That the pity is that all days are like this, like this . . .
The pity is that, happily or unhappily,
The soul must enjoy or suffer the profound tedium of
everything,
Consciously or unconsciously,
Thinking or not yet thinking . . .
That is the pity . . .
I photographically remember your listless hands
Lying there, still.
I remember them, in this moment, more than I remember you.
What’s become of you?
I know that, in the enormous elsewhere of life,
You married. I presume you’re a mother. You’re probably
happy.
Why wouldn’t you be?
Only because of some injustice.
Yes, it would be unfair . . .
Unfair?
(It was a sunny day in the fields and I dozed, smiling.)
Li
fe . . .
White wine or red, it’s all the same: it’s to throw up.
No, it’s not weariness . . .
It’s heaps of disillusion
Contaminating how I think,
It’s an upside-down Sunday
Of feeling,
A holiday spent in the pit . . .
No, it isn’t weariness . . .
It’s the fact I exist
And the world too,
With everything in it,
With everything in it that keeps unfolding
And that’s just various identical copies of the same thing.
No. Why call it weariness?
It’s an abstract sensation
Of concrete life—
Sort of like a shout
Not uttered,
Sort of like an anxiety
Not suffered,
Or not suffered completely,
Or not suffered like . . .
Yes, or not suffered like . . .
That’s it: like . . .
Like what?
If I knew, I wouldn’t have this false weariness.
(Ah, blind people singing in the street . . .
One man playing guitar, another on fiddle, and the woman’s
voice
Add up to quite a barrel organ!)
Because I hear, I see.
Okay, I admit it: it’s weariness!
FERNANDO PESSOA- HIMSELF
What I am essentially—behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth—is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY. (...) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood.
(FROM A LETTER OF PESSOA DATED 20 JANUARY 1935)
from SONGBOOK
O church bell of my village,
Each of your plaintive tolls
Filling the calm evening
Rings inside my soul.
And your ringing is so slow,
So as if life made you sad,
That already your first clang
Seems like a repeated sound.
However closely you touch me
When I pass by, always drifting,
You are to me like a dream—
In my soul your ringing is distant.
With every one of your clangs
Resounding across the sky,
I feel the past farther away,
I feel nostalgia close by.
8 APRIL 1911
ABDICATION
O night eternal, call me your son
And take me into your arms. I’m a king
Who relinquished, willingly,
My throne of dreams and tedium.
My sword, which dragged my weak arms down,
I surrendered to strong and steady hands,
And in the anteroom I abandoned
My shattered scepter and crown.
My spurs that jingled to no avail
And my useless coat of mail
I left on the cold stone steps.
I took off royalty, body and soul,
And returned to the night so calm, so old,
Like the landscape when the sun sets.
JANUARY 1913
Swamps of yearnings brushing against my gilded soul . . .
Distant tolling of Other Bells . . . The blond wheat paling
In the ashen sunset . . . My soul is seized by a bodily chill . . .
How forever equal the Hour! . . . The tops of the palms
swaying! . . .
The leaves staring at the silence inside us . . . Wispy autumn
Of a hazy bird’s singing . . . Stagnant, forgotten blue . . .
How quiet the shout of yearning that gives this Hour claws!
How my self-dread longs for something that doesn’t weep!
My hands reach out to the beyond, but even as they’re
reaching
I see that what I desire is not what I want . . .
Cymbals of Imperfection . . . O distantly ancient Hour
Banished from its own Time-self! Receding wave that invades
My ceaseless retreating into myself until I faint,
So intent on the present I that I seem to forget myself! . . .
Liquid of halos with no Was behind it, no Self inside it . . .
The Mystery smacks of my being other . . . Bursting in the
moonlight . . .
The sentry stands very straight, but his lance planted on the
ground
Is still taller than he . . . What’s all this for? . . . The flat
day . . .
Climbing vines of absurdity tickling Beyonds with this
Hour . . .
Horizons shutting our eyes to space, where they are false
links . . .
Opium fanfares of future silences . . . Faraway trains . . .
Gates in the distance . . . seen through the trees . . . so utterly
iron!
29 MARCH 1913
I
My dream of an infinite port crosses this landscape
And in the flowers’ colors I see the sails of large ships
Casting off from the wharf, dragging the silhouettes of these
old
Sunlit trees as their shadows over the waters . . .
The port I dream of is somber and pallid,
And the landscape is sunny viewed from this side . . .
But in my mind today’s sun is a somber port
And the ships leaving the port are these sunlit trees . . .
Freed into two, I slid straight down the landscape . . .
The substance of the wharf is the clear and calm road
That rises, going up like a wall,
And the ships pass through the trunks of the trees
In a vertically horizontal fashion,
Dropping their lines in the water through the leaves one by
one . . .
I don’t know who I dream I am . . .
Suddenly all the seawater in the port is transparent
And I see on the bottom, like a huge print unrolled across it,
This entire landscape, a row of trees, a road glowing in that
port,
And the shadow of a sailing ship older than the port and
passing
Between my dream of the port and my looking at this
landscape,
And it approaches me, enters me,
And passes to the other side of my soul . . .
III
The Great Sphinx of Egypt dreams inside this sheet of
paper . . .
I write—and she appears to me through my transparent hand
And the pyramids rise up in a corner of the paper . . .
I write—and I’m startled to see that the nib of my pen
Is the profile of King Cheops . . .
I freeze . . .
Everything goes dark . . . I fall into an abyss made of time . . .
I’m buried under the pyramids writing verses by the bright
light of this lamp
And the whole of Egypt presses down on me through the
strokes I make with my pen . . .
I hear the Sphinx laughing to herself
The sound of my pen running over the paper . . .
An enormous hand, passing through my not being able to
see her,
Sweeps everything into the corner of the ceiling that’s
behind me,
And on the paper where I write, between it and the pen
that’s writing,
Lies the corpse of King Cheops, looking at me with
wide-open eyes,
And be
tween our gazing at each other flows the Nile,
And a gaiety of flag-bedecked ships meanders
In a hazy diagonal line
Between me and what I’m thinking . . .
Funeral of King Cheops in old gold and Me! . . .
V
Outside a whirlwind of sun the horses of the merry-go-
round . . .
Within me a static dance of trees, stones and hills . . .
Absolute night in the brightly lit fair, moonlight on the sunny
day outside,
And the fair’s many lights make noises out of the garden
walls . . .
Groups of girls with jugs on their heads
Passing by outside and drenched by the sun
Cut across thick crowds of people at the fair,
People mixed up with the lights of the stands, with the night
and the moonlight,
And the two groups meet and blend
Until they form just one which is both . . .
The fair, the fair lights, the people at the fair
And the night that seizes the fair and lifts it into the air
Are above the tops of the trees drenched by the sun,
They’re visible beneath the rocks that gleam in the sun,
They pop out from behind the jugs carried on the girls’ heads,
And the whole of this spring landscape is the moon above the
fair,
And the whole fair, with its sounds and lights, is the ground
of this sunny day . . .