The Book of Disquiet (28 page)

Since early morning and against the solar custom of this bright city, the fog had wrapped a weightless mantle (which the sun slowly gilded) around the rows of houses, the cancelled open spaces, and the shifting heights of land and of buildings. But as the hours advanced towards midday, the gentle mist began to unravel until, with breaths like flapping shadows of veils, it expired altogether. By ten o’clock, the tenuous blueing of the sky was the only evidence that there had been fog.

The city’s features were reborn once the blurry mask slipped away. As if a window had been opened, the already dawned day dawned. There was a slight change in all the sounds, which had also suddenly returned. A blue tint infiltrated even the stones of the streets and the impersonal auras of pedestrians. The sun was warm, but still humidly so, filtered by the vanished fog.

The awakening of a city, with or without fog, moves me far more than the breaking of dawn in the country. It’s much more of a rebirth, there’s much more to look forward to, when the sun – instead of just gilding the grasses, the shrubs’ silhouettes and the trees’ countless green hands with its murky, then moist, and finally luminously gold light – multiplies its possible effects on windows (in myriad reflections), walls (painting them different colours) and rooftops (shading each one uniquely) to make a glorious morning absolutely distinct from so many
other distinctive realities. A dawning in the country does me good; a dawning in the city good and bad, and so it does me more than just good. Yes, because the greater hope it stirs in me has, like all hopes, that slightly bitter, nostalgic taste of not being reality. The country morning exists; the city morning promises. The former makes one live; the latter makes one think. And I’m doomed always to feel, like the world’s great damned men, that it’s better to think than to live.

After the heat began to wane at summer’s end, it sometimes happened in late afternoon that certain softer hues in the broad sky and certain strokes of cold breezes already signalled the coming of autumn. There was still no discolouring or falling of leaves, nor yet that vague anxiety we naturally feel when we see death all around us, since we know ours will also come. But there was a sort of flagging of all effort, a vague slumber fallen over the last signs of action. Ah, with so much sad indifference in these afternoons, the autumn begins in us before it begins in things.

Each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that all things will end, which is something we’re apt to forget when we look around us in spring or summer.

It’s still not autumn, there’s still no yellow of fallen leaves in the air, still none of that damp sadness that marks the weather when it’s on its way to becoming winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness – a sorrow dressed for the journey – in our hazy awareness of colours being smattered, of the wind’s different sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in the falling night across the ineluctable presence of the universe.

Yes, we will all pass, we will pass everything. Nothing will remain of the man who wore feelings and gloves, who talked about death and local politics. Just as one and the same light illumines the faces of saints and the gaiters of pedestrians, so too the same lack of light will cause darkness to engulf the nothing that remains of some having been
saints and others having used gaiters. In the vast whirlwind where the whole world listlessly turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blonde girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the sceptres that stood for empires. All is nothing, and in the entrance hall to the Invisible, whose open door reveals merely a closed door beyond, all things dance, servants of the wind which churns them without hands – all things, big and small, which for us and in us formed the perceptible system of the universe. All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons. Some of us, light leaves, and therefore less earthbound, ascend high in the hall’s whirl and fall farther away from the circle of the heavy. Others, almost invisible but still equally dust, different only if seen close up, form their own layer in the whirlwind. Still others, tree trunks in miniature, are dragged around and come to a halt here and there. One day, when everything is finally and fully revealed, that other door will open and all that we were – rubbish of stars and souls – will be swept outside the house, so that what exists can start over.

My heart hurts me like a foreign body. My brain sleeps all that I feel. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn which brings to the air and to my soul that unsmiling light whose lifeless yellow tinges the irregular, rounded edges of the sunset’s several clouds. Yes, it’s the beginning of autumn and the clear awareness, in the limpid hour, of the anonymous inadequacy of everything. Autumn, yes, autumn, the one that’s here or that’s yet to come, and the foretasted weariness of all acts, the foretasted disillusion of all dreams. What can I hope for and where would it come from? Already, in what I think of myself, I’m there among the leaves and dust of the entrance hall, in the meaningless orbit of nothing at all, making sounds of life on the clean flagstones gilded by the last rays of a sun setting I don’t know where.

All that I’ve thought, all that I’ve dreamed, all that I have or haven’t done – all will go in autumn, like used matches strewn over the floor and pointing various ways, or papers crumpled into fake balls, or the great empires, all religions, the philosophies that the drowsy children of the abyss invented for sport. All that constituted my soul, from my lofty ambitions to my humble rented room, from the gods I had to the
boss – Senhor Vasques – that I also had, all will go in autumn, all in autumn, in the tender indifference of autumn. All in autumn, yes, all in autumn.

We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I’ll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world’s darkness.

Clouds… Today I’m conscious of the sky, but there are days when I just feel it and don’t look at it, when I just live in the city and not in the world of nature that includes it. Clouds… Today they are the main reality, worrying me as if an overcast sky were one of the imminent dangers of my destiny. Clouds… They pass from the sea to the Castle, from west to east, in a scattered and naked tumult: white
when they raggedly proceed at the forefront of who knows what; half-black when they linger, waiting for the purring wind to blow them away; and black with a dirty whiteness when – as if wishing to stay – they darken with their arrival more than with their shadow the illusory space opened up by the streets between the impassable rows of buildings.

Clouds… I exist without knowing it and will die without wanting to. I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the fleshly and abstract average of things that are nothing, I being likewise nothing. Clouds… Such disquiet when I feel, such discomfort when I think, such futility when I desire! Clouds… They’re still passing, some of them so huge it seems they’ll fill the whole sky (though the buildings prevent us from seeing if they’re really as large as they appear), while others are of indefinite size, being perhaps two together or one that’s going to split in two, meaningless in the heights of the exhausted sky, and still others are small, as if they were playthings of powerful beings, odd-shaped balls of some absurd game and now placed to one side of the sky, in cold isolation.

Clouds… I question myself and don’t know me. Nothing I’ve done has been useful, and nothing I do will be any different. I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine. I’m objectively and subjectively sick of myself. I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything. Clouds… They’re everything: disintegrated fragments of atmosphere, the only real things today between the worthless earth and the non-existent sky, indescribable tatters of the tedium I ascribe to them, mist condensed into colourless threats, dirty wads of cotton from a hospital without walls. Clouds… They’re like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering or not thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth’s noise but without the sky’s peace. Clouds… They continue to pass, passing always, they will always continue, in a discontinuous rolling of dull-coloured skeins, in a scattered prolongation of false, broken sky.

The day’s fluid departure ends in exhausted purples. No one would be able to say who I am, nor know who I’ve been. I came down from the unknown mountain to the unknown valley, and in the languid evening my steps were tracks left in the woods’ clearings. Everyone I loved had forgotten me in the shade. No one knew when the last boat was. The post office had no information about the letter that nobody would ever write.

But it was all false. They told none of the stories that nobody told them, and no one knows anything for sure about the one who departed long ago, placing his hope in the false voyage, son of the fog and indecision to come. I have a name among those who tarry, and that name is shadow, like everything.

Ah, but not even the alcove was genuine – it was the old alcove of my lost childhood! It withdrew like a fog, passing materially through the white walls of my real room, which emerged from the shadows distinct and smaller, like life and the day, like the creaking of the wagon and the faint sound of the whip that puts muscles for standing up into the prone body of the tired animal.

How many things that we consider right or true are merely the vestiges of our dreams, the sleepwalking figures of our incomprehension! Does anyone know what’s right or true? How many things we consider beautiful are merely the fashion of the day, the fiction of their time
and place? How many things we consider ours are utterly foreign to our blood, we being merely their perfect mirrors or transparent wrappers!

The more I meditate on our capacity for self-deception, the more my certainties crumble, slipping through my fingers as fine sand. And when this meditation becomes a feeling that clouds my mind, then the whole world appears to me as a mist made of shadows, a twilight of edges and corners, a fiction of the interlude,* a dawn that never becomes morning. Everything transforms into a dead absolute of itself, into a stagnation of details. And even my senses, to where I transfer my meditation in order to forget it, are a kind of slumber, something remote and derivative, an in-betweenness, variation, by-products of shadows and confusion.

In times like these – when I could readily understand ascetics and recluses, were I able to understand how anyone can make an effort on behalf of absolute ends or subscribe to a creed that might produce an effort – I would create, if I could, a full-fledged aesthetics of despair, an inner rhythm like a crib’s rocking, filtered by the night’s caresses in other, far-flung homelands.

Today, at different times, I ran into two friends who’d had a fight. Each one told me his version of why they’d fought. Each one told me the truth. Each one gave me his reasons. They were both right. They were both absolutely right. It’s not that one of them saw it one way and the other another way, or that one saw one side of what happened and the other a different side. No: each one saw things exactly as they’d happened, each one saw them according to the same criterion, but each one saw something different, and so each one was right.

I was baffled by this dual existence of truth.

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so too, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself –
not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.