The Book of Disquiet (37 page)

And as with books, so with everything… As soon as something occurs to me that might interrupt the silent procession of my days, I lift my eyes with heavy protest towards the sylph who belongs to me and who, poor thing, might have been a siren had she only learned to sing.

266

When I first came to Lisbon I used to hear, from the apartment above ours, the sound of scales played on a piano, the monotonous practising of a girl I never actually saw. Today I realize that in the cellar of my soul, by some mysterious process of infiltration, those scales persist, audible if the door below is opened, played over and over by the girl who is now someone else, a grown woman, or dead and enclosed in a white place where verdant cypresses blackly wave.

I’m no longer the child I was back then, but the sound of the playing is the same in my memory as it was in reality, so that whenever it gets up from where it pretends to be sleeping, it has the same slow finger work, the same rhythmic monotony. When I feel or think about it, I’m overwhelmed by a vague and anxious sadness that’s my own.

I don’t mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost. It’s not the concrete passing of my own days but the abstract flight of time that torments my physical brain with the relentless repetition of the piano scales from upstairs, terribly anonymous and far away. It’s the huge mystery of nothing lasting which incessantly hammers things that aren’t really music, just nostalgia, in the absurd depths of my memory.

I summon up, insensibly, the vision of the sitting room that I never saw, where the pupil I never met is still playing today, finger by careful finger, the forever identical scales of what’s already dead. I see, I see more and more, I reconstruct by seeing. And the entire household of the upstairs apartment, for which today I feel a nostalgia I didn’t feel yesterday, is fictitiously constructed by my uncertain contemplation.

I suspect, however, that all of this is vicarious, that the nostalgia I feel isn’t truly mine or truly abstract but is the emotion intercepted from an unidentified third party, for whom these emotions, which in me are literary, are – as Vieira* would say – literal. Conjectured feelings are what grieve and torment me, and the nostalgia that makes my eyes well with tears is conceived and felt through imagination and projection.

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world’s depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a
piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It’s the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it’s dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it’s remorse for what I did or didn’t do; it’s the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn’t belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I’m going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.

And always, always, as if in a part of my brain that had become autonomous, the scales play, play, play, below me and above me, in the first building I lived in when I came to Lisbon.

267

It’s the last death of Captain Nemo. Soon I too will die.

All of my childhood was deprived, in that moment, of any possibility of enduring.

268

Smell is a strange way of seeing. It evokes sentimental scenes, sketched all of a sudden by the subconscious. I’ve often experienced this. I’m walking down a street. I see nothing, or rather, I look all around and see the way everyone sees. I know I’m walking down a street and don’t know that it exists with two sides comprised of variously shaped buildings made by human hands. I’m walking down a street. The smell of bread from a bakery nauseates me with its sweetness, and my
childhood rises up from a distant neighbourhood, and another bakery emerges from that fairyland which is everything we ever had that has died. I’m walking down a street. Suddenly I smell the fruit on the slanted rack of the small grocery, and my short life in the country – I can’t say from when or where – has trees in the background and peace in what can only be my childhood heart. I’m walking down a street. I’m unexpectedly thrown off balance by the smell of crates from the crate-maker’s: my dear Cesário!* You appear before me and at last I’m happy, for I’ve returned by way of memory to the only truth, which is literature.

269

One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read
The Pickwick Papers
. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)

270

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.

Love, sleep, drugs and intoxicants are elementary forms of art, or rather, of producing the same effect as art. But love, sleep and drugs all have their disillusion. Love wearies or disappoints. We wake up from sleep, and while sleeping we haven’t lived. And we pay for drugs with the ruin of the very body they served to stimulate. But in art there is no disillusion, since illusion is accepted from the start. There’s no waking up from art, because we dream but don’t sleep in it. Nor do we pay a tax or penalty for having enjoyed art.

Since the pleasure we get from art is in a sense not our own, we don’t have to pay for it or regret it later.

By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours – the
trail left by what has passed, a smile given to someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe.

To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.

271

It’s not love but love’s outskirts that are worth knowing…

The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.

272

Christ is a form of emotion.

In the Pantheon there’s room for all the gods that mutually exclude each other; all have their throne and their sovereignty. Each one can be everything, for here there are no limits, not even logical ones, and the mingling of various immortals allows us to enjoy the coexistence of diverse infinities and assorted eternities.

273

Nothing is ever sure in history. There are periods of order when everything is contemptible and periods of disorder in which all is lofty. Decadent eras abound in mental vitality, mighty eras in intellectual weakness. Everything mixes and criss-crosses, and truth exists only in so far as it is presumed.

So many noble ideas fallen into the dung heap, so many heartfelt desires lost in the torrent!

Gods and men – they’re all the same to me in the rampant confusion of unpredictable fate. They march through my dreams in this anonymous fourth-floor room, and they’re no more to me than they were to those who believed in them. Idols of leery, wide-eyed Africans, animal deities of hinterland savages, the Egyptians’ personified symbols, luminous Greek divinities, stiff Roman gods, Mithras lord of the Sun and of emotion, Jesus lord of consequences and charity, various versions of the same Christ, new holy gods of new towns – all of them make up the funeral march (be it a pilgrimage or burial) of error and illusion. They all march, and behind them march the dreams that are just empty shadows cast on the ground but that the worst dreamers suppose are firmly planted there: pathetic concepts without body or soul – Liberty, Humanity, Happiness, a Better Future, Social Science – moving forward in the solitude of darkness like leaves dragged along by the train of a royal robe stolen by beggars.

274

Revolutionaries make a crass and grievous error when they distinguish between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the nobility and the common people, the ruling and the ruled. The only distinction is between those who adapt and those who don’t; the rest is literature, and bad literature. The beggar, if he adapts, can become king tomorrow, though in doing so he’ll forfeit the virtue of being a beggar. He’ll have crossed the border, losing his nationality.

These thoughts console me in this cramped office, whose grimy windows overlook a joyless street. These thoughts console me, and for company I have my fellow creators of the world’s consciousness – the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp,..... and even, if the reference be permitted, Jesus Christ, who was nothing in the world, his very existence being doubted by history. Quite a different class of men is formed by the likes of the state councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
the senator Victor Hugo, the chief of state Lenin, the chief of state Mussolini .....

Those of us in the shade, among the delivery boys and the barbers, constitute humanity .....

On the one hand there are the kings with their prestige, the emperors with their glory, the geniuses with their aura, the saints with their haloes, the leaders with their supremacy, the prostitutes, the prophets and the rich… On the other hand there’s us – the delivery boy on the corner, the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, the barber with his jokes, John Milton the schoolteacher, the shop assistant, Dante Alighieri the tramp, those whom death forgets or consecrates and whom life forgot without ever consecrating.

275

Government of the world begins in us. It’s not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere; it’s those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.

276

An opinion is a vulgarity, even when it’s not sincere.

Every instance of sincerity is an intolerance. There are no sincere liberal minds. There are, for that matter, no liberal minds.

277

There everything is feeble, anonymous and gratuitous. There I saw great demonstrations of compassion, which seemed to reveal the depths of tragically sad souls, but I discovered that the demonstrations lasted no longer than the moment in which they were words, and that they originated – how often I observed this with the discernment of the silent – in something analogous to pity, lost as swiftly as the novelty of the observation, or else in the wine of the compassionate soul’s dinner. There was always a direct relationship between the humanitarian sentiments expressed and the amount of brandy consumed, and many a grand gesture suffered from one glass too many or from a pleonastic thirst.

All of these individuals had sold their souls to a devil from hell’s riff-raff, a devil that craved sordidness and idleness. They lived drunken lives of vanity and sloth, and limply died in the cushions of words, in a morass of scorpions whose venom is mere drool.

The most extraordinary thing about all of these people was their complete and unanimous lack of importance, in every sense of the word. Some wrote for the major newspapers and succeeded in not existing. Others figured prominently in the professional register and succeeded in doing nothing in life. Others were even poets of renown, but one and the same ashen dust paled their foolish faces, and they were all a graveyard of embalmed stiffs, positioned with their hands on their hips, in postures of the living.

From the short time that I stagnated in that exile of mental cleverness, I’ve retained the memory of a few good and genuinely amusing moments, of many dull and unhappy moments, of several profiles standing out from the nothingness, of some gestures directed at whatever waitress happened to be on duty – in short, a physically nauseating tedium and the remembrance of a funny joke or two.

Interspersed among them like blank spaces there were a few older men, who with their outmoded witticisms would backbite like the others, and about the same people.

I’ve never felt so much sympathy for the minor figures of public glory as when I saw them vilified by these minor men who grudge them
their petty glory. I understood then why the pariahs of Greatness are able to triumph: because they triumph in relation to these men and not in relation to humanity.

Poor devils with their insatiable hunger – either hungry for lunch, hungry for fame, or hungry for life’s desserts. Anyone who hears them for the first time will imagine he’s listening to Napoleon’s tutors and Shakespeare’s teachers.

Some triumph in love, some triumph in politics, and some triumph in art. The first group has the advantage of storytelling, since one can be highly successful in love without there being public knowledge of what happened. Of course, on hearing one of these men recount his sexual marathons, we begin to have our doubts after about the seventh conquest. Those who are the lovers of aristocratic or well-known ladies (and it seems to be the case for nearly all of them) ravage so many countesses that a tally of their conquests would shatter the gravity and composure of even the great-grandmothers of young women with titles.

Some specialize in physical conflict, killing the boxing champions of Europe in nocturnal revelries on the street corners of Chiado.* Others have influence over all the ministers of all the ministries, and these are the ones whose claims are at least plausible.