Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. The wind, blowing uncertainly, was a formless ag unfurled over a non-existent army post. High, strong gusts ripped through nothing at all, and the window-frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God* (and my soul felt sorry for God).
Suddenly a new order of universal things acted on the city, the wind whistled in its lulls, and there was a slumbering awareness of countless agitations on high. Then the night closed like a trapdoor, and a vast calm made me wish I’d been sleeping.
During the rst days of Autumn when nightfall arrives suddenly, as if prematurely, and it seems we took longer to do our day’s work, I enjoy, while still working, the thought of not working which the darkness brings, for the darkness is night, and night means sleep, home, freedom. When the lights come on, dispelling darkness from the large o ce, and we continue our day’s work in the beginning of night, I feel a comfort that’s absurd, like a remembrance belonging to someone else, and I’m at peace with the numbers I write, as if I were reading while waiting to fall asleep.
We’re all slaves of external circumstances. A sunny day transports us from a café on a narrow side street to wide-open elds; an overcast sky in the country makes us close up, taking shelter as best we can in the house without doors of our own self; the onset of night, even in the midst of daytime activities, enlarges – like a slowly opening fan – our awareness that we ought to rest.
But the work doesn’t slow down; it gets livelier. We no longer work; we amuse ourselves with the labour to which we’re condemned. And all of a sudden, across the huge columned sheet of my numerary destiny, the old house of my elderly aunts, shut o from the world, shelters the drowsy ten o’clock tea, and the kerosene lamp of my lost childhood, glowing only on the linen-covered table, blinds me to the sight of Moreira, illuminated by a black electricity in nities away from me. The maid, who is even older than my aunts, brings in the tea, along with the vestiges of her interrupted nap and the a ectionately patient grumpiness of old-time servants, and across all my dead past I enter items and totals without a single mistake. I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, unde led by mystery and the future.
And so gentle is the sensation that estranges me from debits and credits that if by chance I’m asked a question, I answer in a soft voice, as if my being were hollow, as if it were nothing more than a typewriter I carry around with me – portable, opened and ready. It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak, write, answer, or even discuss. And through it all the long- lost tea nishes, the o ce is going to close… From the ledger which I slowly shut I raise
because I must, that with the closing of my o ce my dream also closes; that as my hand shuts the ledger it also pulls a veil over my irretrievable past; that I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and ow of my confused consciousness, like two tides in the black night where the destinies of nostalgia and desolation meet.
Sometimes I think I’ll never leave the Rua dos Douradores. And having written this, it seems to me eternity.
Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom.
To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.
… and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue…
… a disdain full of disgust for those who don’t realize that the only reality is each man’s soul, and that everything else – the exterior world and other people – is but an unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion.
My aversion to e ort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent e ort. War, energetic and productive labour, helping others – all this strikes me as the product of an impertinence...
Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.
It’s not the cracked walls of my rented room, nor the shabby desks in the o ce where I work, nor the poverty of the same old downtown streets in between, which I’ve crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable – none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. It’s the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all – they’re the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It’s the sordid monotony of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I’m their fellow man – that is what dresses me in a convict’s clothes, places me in a jail cell, and makes me apocryphal and beggarly.
There are times when each detail of the ordinary interests me for its own sake, and I feel a fondness for things, because I can read them clearly. Then I see – as Vieira* said that Sousa,* in his descriptions, saw – the ordinary in its singularity, and I have the poetic soul that inspired the intellectual age of poetry among the Greeks. But there are also moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.
Yes, my particular virtue of being very often objective, and thus sidetracked from thinking about myself, su ers lapses of a rmation, as do all virtues and even all vices. And I start to wonder how I’m able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people, exactly like them, in true conformity to their shoddy illusion. Like ashes from a distant lighthouse, I see all the solutions o ered by the imagination’s female side: ight, suicide, renunciation, grandiose acts of our aristocratic self- awareness, the swashbuckling novel of existences without balconies.
But the ideal Juliet of the best possible reality closed the high window of the literary encounter on the ctitious Romeo of my blood. She obeys her father; he obeys his. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets continues, the curtain falls on what didn’t happen, and I go on home – to my rented room where I loathe the landlady who isn’t
tomorrow – with the collar of a clerk’s coat turned up without astonishment over the neck of a poet, with my boots (always purchased in the same shop) automatically avoiding the puddles of cold rain, and with a bit of mixed concern, for having once more forgotten my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.*