The Book of Disquiet (52 page)

Let us fashion garlands so that, once finished, they can be thoroughly and meticulously taken apart.

Let us mix paints on a palette without having a canvas on which to paint. Let us order stone for chiselling without having a chisel and without being sculptors. Let us make everything an absurdity and turn all our sterile hours into pure futilities. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.

Let us hear God* tell us we exist with a delighted and incredulous smile on our lips. Let us watch Time paint the world and find the painting not only false but also empty.

Let us think with sentences that contradict one another, speaking out loud in sounds that aren’t sounds and colours that aren’t colours. Let us affirm – and grasp, which would be impossible – that we are conscious of not being conscious, and that we are not what we are. Let us explain all this by way of a hidden, paradoxical meaning that things have in their divine, reverse-side dimension, and let us not believe too much in the explanation so that we won’t have to give it up…

Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking. Let us make all our thoughts of action languish in torpor.

And over all of this the horror of living will hover remotely* like a blue and unbroken sky.

But the landscapes we dream are just shades of the landscapes we’ve seen, and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world.

Imaginary figures have more depth and truth than real ones.

My imaginary world has always been the only true world for me. I’ve never had loves so real and so full of verve and blood and life as the ones I’ve had with characters I myself created. What madness! I miss them because, like all loves, these kind also come and go…

Sometimes, in my inner dialogues on exquisite afternoons of Imagination, as I carry on weary conversations in imaginary sitting rooms at twilight, it can happen during a lull in the discussion that, finding myself alone with an interlocutor who’s more I than the others, I start to wonder why our scientific age’s will to understand hasn’t been extended to artificial, inorganic things. And one of the questions that I most languidly ponder is why we don’t develop, along with the usual psychology of human and subhuman creatures, a psychology (for surely they have one) of artificial figures and of creatures whose
existence takes place only in rugs and in pictures. It’s a sad view of reality that would limit it to the organic realm and not place the idea of soul in statuettes and needlework. Where there’s form there’s a soul.

These private deliberations aren’t an idle pastime but a scientific lucubration like any other. And so, before having an answer and without knowing if I’ll ever have one, I think of what’s possible as if it already existed, and with inner analyses and intense concentration I envision the likely results of this actualized desideratum. As soon as I start thinking this way, scientists immediately appear in my mind, hunched over illustrations that they know to be real lives; microscopists of warp and weft emerge from the rugs, physicists emerge from the broad, swirling patterns around their borders, chemists from the idea of shapes and colours in pictures, geologists from the stratified layers in cameos, and finally (and most importantly) psychologists who record and classify – one by one – the sensations that a statuette must feel, the ideas that pass through the hazy psyche of a figure in a painting or a stained-glass window, the wild impulses, the unbridled passions, the occasional hatreds and sympathies and? found in these special universes marked by death and immobility – whether in the eternal gestures of bas-reliefs or in the immortal consciousnesses of painted figures.

More than the other arts, literature and music are fertile territory for the subtleties of a psychologist. Novelistic figures, as we all know, are as real as any of us. Certain aspects of sounds have a swift, winged soul, but they are still susceptible to psychology and sociology. Let all the ignorant be informed: veritable societies exist in colours, sounds and sentences, even as regimes and revolutions, reigns, politics and
exist literally, not metaphorically, in the instrumental ensembles of symphonies, in the structured wholes of novels, and in the square feet of a complex painting, where the colourful poses of warriors, lovers or symbolic figures find enjoyment, suffer, and mingle together.

When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain
. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn’t shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. To know this (and with what precision I know it!) is to have gone beyond modern science.

I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little. Books are introductions to dreams, and no introductions are necessary for one who freely and naturally enters into conversation with them. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow. After a few minutes it’s I who am writing, and what I write is nowhere to be found.

My favourite things to read are the banal books that sleep with me at my bedside. There are two that I always have close at hand: Father Figueiredo’s
Rhetoric
,* and Father Freire’s
Reflections on the Portuguese Language
.* I always reread these books with pleasure, and while it’s true I’ve read them over many times, it’s also true that I’ve read neither one straight through. I’m indebted to these books for a discipline I doubt I could ever have acquired on my own: to write with objectivity, with reason as one’s constant guide.

The affected, dry, monastic style of Father Figueiredo is a discipline that delights my intellect. The nearly always undisciplined verbosity of Father Freire amuses my mind without tiring it, and teaches me without stirring up any worries. Both are learned, untroubled minds that confirm my complete lack of desire to be like them, or like anyone else.

I read and abandon myself, not to my reading but to me. I read and fall asleep, and it’s as if my already dreaming eyes still followed Father Figueiredo’s descriptions of the figures of speech, and it’s in enchanted forests that I hear Father Freire explain that one should say ‘Magdalena’, because only an ignorant person says ‘Madalena’.

I hate to read. The mere thought of unfamiliar pages bores me. I can read only what I already know. My bedside book is Father Figueiredo’s
Rhetoric
, where every night I read yet again for the thousandth time,
in correct and clerical Portuguese, the descriptions of various figures of speech, whose names I still haven’t learned. But the language lulls me....., and I’d sleep fitfully were I to miss out on the Jesuitical words written with
c
.*

I must, however, give credit to the exaggerated purism of Father Figueiredo’s book for the relative care I take – as much as I can muster

– to write correctly the language in which I express myself.....

And I read:

(a passage from Father Figueiredo)

– pompous, empty[?] and cold,

and this helps me forget life.

Or this:

(a passage about figures of speech),

which returns in the preface.

I’m not exaggerating a verbal smidgen: I feel all this.

As others read passages from the Bible, I read them from this
Rhetoric
. But I have two advantages: complete repose and lack of devotion.

The trivial things that make up life, the trifles of the ordinary and routine, like a dust that underscores – with a hideous, smudged line – the sordidness and vileness of my human existence: the Cashbook lying open before eyes that dream of countless Orients; the office manager’s inoffensive joke that offends the whole universe; the could you please ask Senhor Vasques to call me, his girlfriend, Miss so -and-so, right when I was pondering the most asexual part of an aesthetic and intellectual theory.

And then there are one’s friends, good fellows, good fellows, great to be with them and talk, to have lunch together, dinner together, but all of it, I don’t know, so sordid and pathetic and trivial, because even on the street we remain in the fabric warehouse, even overseas we’re still seated before the Cashbook, and even in infinity we still have our boss.

Everyone has an office manager with a joke that’s out of place, and everyone has a soul that falls outside the normal universe. Everyone has a boss and the boss’s girlfriend, and the phone call that arrives at the inevitably worst moment, when the evening is wondrously falling and girlfriends politely offer their apologies [?] or else leave messages for their lover, who we all know has gone out for a fancy tea.

All who dream – even if they don’t dream in a downtown Lisbon office, bent over the accounts of a fabric warehouse – have before them a Cashbook, which may be the woman they married, or the administration of a future they’ve inherited, or anything at all that positively exists.

All of us who dream and think are assistant bookkeepers in a fabric warehouse or in some other business in this or another downtown. We enter amounts and lose; we add up totals and pass on; we close the books and the invisible balance is always against us.

The words I write make me smile, but my heart is ready to break – to break like things that shatter into fragments, shards and debris, hauled away in a bin on somebody’s shoulders to the eternal rubbish cart of every City Council.

And everything is waiting, dressed up and expectant, for the King who will come and who is already arriving, for the dust of his retinue forms a new mist in the slowly appearing east, and the lances in the distance are already flashing with their own dawn.

Hieratic figures from mysterious hierarchies are lined up in the corridors, waiting for you. There are fair-haired boys bearing lances, young men
with scattered flashes of naked blades, reflections glancing off helmets and brass, dark glimpses of silks and tarnished gold.

All that the imagination infects, the funereal feeling that makes pageants melancholy and even weighs on us in victories, the mysticism of nothing, the asceticism of absolute negation…

Not the six feet of cold earth that cover our closed eyes beneath the warm sun and next to the green grass, but the death that surpasses our life and is a life all its own – a dead presence in some god, the unknown god of the religion of my Gods.*

The Ganges also passes by the Rua dos Douradores. All eras exist in this cramped room – the mixture
the multicoloured march of customs, the distances between cultures, and the vast variety of nations.