The Book of Disquiet (26 page)

The slightest action weighs on me like a heroic deed. The mere idea of a gesture wearies me, as if it were something I actually thought of doing.

I aspire to nothing. Life hurts me. I’m not well where I am nor anywhere else I can think of being.

What would be ideal is to have no more action than the false action of a fountain – to go up so as to fall down in the same place, pointlessly shimmering in the sun and making sound in the silence of the night so that whoever dreams would think of rivers in his dream and smile forgetfully.

Since the dull beginning of the hot, deceitful day, dark clouds with jagged edges had been ranging over the oppressed city. Towards the estuary they were grimly piled one on top the other, and as they spread, so did a forewarning of tragedy, in the streets’ vague rancour against the altered sun.

At midday, when we left for lunch, a dire expectation hung in the pallid atmosphere. Shreds of tattered clouds were growing blacker in the foreground. Towards the Castle the sky was clear but with something ominous in its blue. The sun was out but it wasn’t enticing.

When we returned to the office, at half-past one, the sky seemed clearer, but only over one of the older parts of town, towards the estuary, where there was indeed more visibility. On the city’s northern side, the clouds slowly coalesced into just one cloud, black and implacable, creeping forward with blunted grey-white claws at the ends of its black arms. Soon it would reach the sun, and the usual city noises seemed to hush, as if waiting. Towards the east the sky was somewhat clearer, or seemed so, but the heat had become even more unpleasant. We sweated in the shadows of the large office. ‘A huge thunderstorm is on its way,’ said Moreira, and he turned the page of the ledger.

By three o’clock the sun had ceased being functional. It was necessary to switch on the lights (which was depressing, for it was summer), first at the back of the office, where goods were being wrapped for shipping, and then in the middle, where it was getting hard to fill out the delivery notes and to mark down the numbers of the railroad vouchers. Finally, close to four o’clock, even those of us privileged to have windows could no longer see well enough to work. The whole office was electrically lit up. Senhor Vasques threw open the door to his private office and said, ‘Moreira, I was supposed to go to Benfica,* but there’s no way – it’s going to pour.’ ‘And it’s coming from that direction,’ answered Moreira, who lived near the Avenida.* The noises from the street, suddenly loud and clear, were somewhat altered. And I don’t know why, but the bells from the trams one block over sounded sad.

Before summer ends and autumn arrives, in the warm interim when the air weighs heavy and the colours dim, the late afternoons wear an almost tangible robe of imitation glory. They’re comparable to those tricks of the imagination, when it makes nostalgia out of nothing, and they go on indefinitely, like the wakes of ships that form never-ending snakes.

These late afternoons fill me, like a sea at high tide, with a feeling worse than tedium but for which there’s no other name. It’s a feeling of desolation I’m unable to pinpoint, a shipwreck of my entire soul. I feel as if I’d lost a benevolent God, as if the Substance of everything had died. And the physical universe is like a corpse that I loved when it was life, but it has all dissolved to nothing in the still warm light of the last coloured clouds.

My tedium takes on an air of horror, and my boredom is a fear. My sweat isn’t cold, but my awareness of it is. I’m not physically ill, but my soul’s anxiety is so intense that it passes through my pores and chills my body.

So great is this tedium, so sovereign my horror of being alive, that I can’t conceive of anything that might serve as a palliative, antidote, balsam or distraction for it. Sleeping horrifies me the way everything does. Dying is as horrifying as everything else. Going and stopping are the same impossible thing. Hope and doubt are equally cold and grey. I’m a shelf of empty jars.

And yet what nostalgia for the future* if I let my ordinary eyes receive the dead salutation of the declining day! How grand is hope’s burial, advancing in the still golden hush of the stagnant skies! What a procession of voids and nothings extends over the reddish blue that will pale in the vast expanses of crystalline space!

I don’t know what I want or don’t want. I’ve stopped wanting, stopped knowing how to want, stopped knowing the emotions or thoughts by which people generally recognize that they want something or want to want it. I don’t know who I am or what I am. Like someone buried under a collapsed wall, I lie under the toppled vacuity of the entire universe. And so I go on, in the wake of myself, until the
night sets in and a little of the comfort of being different wafts, like a breeze, over my incipient self-unawareness.*

Ah, the high and larger moon of these placid nights, torpid with anguish and disquiet! Sinister peace of the heavens’ beauty, cold irony of the warm air, blue blackness misted by moonlight and reticent to reveal stars.

This dreadful hour when I shrink to being possible or rise to mortality.

If only the morning wouldn’t dawn. If only I and this alcove and its interior atmosphere where I belong could all be spiritualized into Night, absolutized into Darkness, so that not so much as a shadow of me would remain that could taint, with my memory, whatever lived on.

Would to the gods, sad heart of mine, that Fate had a meaning! Would to Fate, rather, that the gods had one!

Sometimes, when I wake up at night, I feel invisible hands weaving my destiny.

Here lies my life. Nothing in me disturbs a thing.

My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate. I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out. But my real life couldn’t be more banal and contemptible,
and my dream life couldn’t be more constant and intense. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during siesta – two degradations in one body.

Yes, I distinctly see – with the clarity of reason when it flashes in the blackness of life and isolates the objects around us that make it up – all that is shoddy, worn-out, neglected and spurious in this street called Douradores which is my entire life: this office that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees, this monthly rented room where nothing transpires but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose owner I know in the way people know each other, these young men at the door of the old tavern, this toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these same characters repeating their same old lines, like a drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scenery turned inside out…

But I also realize that to flee this would mean to overcome it or repudiate it, and I’ll never overcome it, because I don’t go beyond it in reality, and I’ll never repudiate it, because no matter what I dream, I always remain where I am.

And my dreaming! The disgrace of escaping into myself, the cowardice of reducing my life to that refuse of the soul which others experience only in their sleep, in the posture of death as they snore, in that stillness when they look like highly developed vegetables!

I can’t make one noble gesture that’s not confined to my own soul, nor have one useless desire that’s not truly, utterly useless!

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

He is Caesar of an entire square block, and it’s only right that all the women like him.

And so I drag myself to do what I don’t want and to dream what I can’t have, my life....., as meaningless as a broken public clock.

My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream
which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows.

The ordinary man, however hard his life may be, at least has the pleasure of not thinking about it. To take life as it comes, living it externally like a cat or a dog – that is how people in general live, and that is how life should be lived, if we would have the contentment of the cat or dog.

To think is to destroy. Thought itself is destroyed in the process of thinking, because to think is to decompose. If men knew how to meditate on the mystery of life, if they knew how to feel the thousand complexities which spy on the soul in every single detail of action, then they would never act – they wouldn’t even live. They would kill themselves from fright, like those who commit suicide to avoid being guillotined the next day.

The air is a veiled yellow, like a pale yellow seen through a dirty white. There’s scarcely any yellow in the grey air, but the paleness of the grey has a yellow in its sadness.

Any change in one’s usual routine is always received by the spirit as a chilly novelty, a slightly uncomfortable pleasure. Anyone who leaves the office at five o’clock when he’s in the habit of leaving at six is bound to experience a mental holiday, and a feeling like regret for not knowing what to do with himself.

Yesterday I left the office at four, as I had to take care of some business far away, and by five o’clock I was through with it. I’m not
used to being out on the streets at that hour, and I found that I was in a different city. The soft light on the usual façades was uselessly tranquil, and the usual pedestrians passed by in the city next to me, like sailors who’d disembarked from last night’s ship.

I returned to the office, which was still open, and my colleagues were naturally astonished, as I’d already bid farewell for the day. What? You’re back? Yes, I’m back. There, all alone with those familiar faces who don’t exist for me spiritually, I was free from having to feel. It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.

It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life.

Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

On the afternoon in which I write, the rain has finally let up. A gladness in the air feels almost too cool against the skin. The day is ending not in grey but in pale blue. A hazy blue is even reflecting off the stones of the street. It hurts to live, but the pain is remote. Feeling doesn’t matter. One or another shop window lights up. In a window
higher up, there are people looking down at the workers who are finishing up for the day. The beggar who brushes my shoulder would be shocked if he knew me.

The indefinite hour grows yet a little later in the now less pale and less blue blueness mirrored in the buildings.

Fall gently final hour of this day in which those who believe and are mistaken engage in their usual labours with the joy of unconsciousness, even in their pain. Fall gently, final wave of light, melancholy of this useless afternoon, fogless haze that seeps into my heart. Fall gently and lightly, shimmering blue paleness of this aquatic afternoon – gently, lightly, sadly over the cold and simple earth. Fall gently, invisible grey, embittered monotony, sleepless tedium.

During three straight days of heat without let-up, a storm lurked in the anxious stillness until finally drifting elsewhere, and then a gentle, almost cool warmth arrived to soothe the bright surface of things. So too, it sometimes happens in life that a soul weighed down by living suddenly feels relief, for no apparent reason.

I see us as climates over which storms threaten, before breaking elsewhere.

The empty immensity of things, the tremendous oblivion in the sky and on earth…

I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment – that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high
balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.