The Book of Disquiet (54 page)

Their houses sheltered me, their hands shook mine, and they saw me walk down the street as if I were there; but the I that I am was never in their living rooms, the I whose life I live has no hands for others to shake, and the I that I know walks down no streets, unless the streets are all streets, nor is seen in them by others, unless he himself is all the others.

We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.

To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations?

But the mask I’d been staring at as it talked on a street corner with an unmasked man on this last night of Carnival finally held out its hand and laughingly said goodbye. The natural-faced man turned left down the street at whose corner he’d been standing. The mask – an uninteresting one – walked straight ahead, disappearing among shadows and occasional lights in a definitive farewell, extraneous to what I was thinking. Only then did I notice that there was more in the street than the glowing street lamps, and where the lamplight didn’t reach there roiled a hazy moonlight, veiled and speechless and full of nothing, like life…

…damply tarnished by a lifeless brown.

…on the frozen avalanche of overlapping rooftops it is a greyish white, damply tarnished by a lifeless brown.

…and the whole ensemble is staggered in diverse clusters of darkness, outlined on one side by white, and dappled with blue shades of cold nacre.

(rain)

And finally, over the darkness of the gleaming rooftops, the cold light of the tepid morning breaks like a torment of the Apocalypse. Once again it’s the vast night of increasing luminosity. Once again it’s the usual horror: the day, life, fictitious purposes, inescapable activity. Once again it’s my physical, visible and social personality, communicated by meaningless words and exploited by the acts and consciousness of others. Once again I’m I, exactly as I’m not. And as this light from the darkness fills with grey doubts the cracks around the shutters (far from hermetic, alas!), I begin to realize that I can no longer hold on to this refuge of staying in bed, of not sleeping but being able to, of dreaming without remembering truth and reality, of nestling between a cool warmth of clean sheets and an ignorance of my body’s existence beyond its feeling of comfort. I realize that I’m losing the happy unconsciousness with which I’ve been enjoying my consciousness, the
animal drowsiness in which I observe – as through the slowly blinking eyelids of a cat in the sun – the movements described by my free imagination’s logic. I realize that the privileges of darkness are vanishing, and with them the slow rivers under the bowing trees of my glimpsed eyelashes, and the murmur of the cascades lost between the soft flowing of blood in my ears and the faint, steady rain. I’m losing myself to become alive.

I don’t know if I’m sleeping or if I just feel as if I were. I’m not exactly dreaming but seem, rather, to be waking up from a sleepless slumber, for I hear the city’s first sounds of life rising like floodwaters from that vague place down below, where the streets made by God run this way and that. The sounds are happy, filtered through the sadness of the rain that’s falling, or that perhaps has stopped falling, for I don’t hear it any more; I’m aware only of the excessive greyness it gives to the light that’s advancing through the cracks, in the shadows of a clarity too faint for this time of morning, whatever time that may be. The sounds are happy, scattered, and painful to my heart,* as if they were calling me to an exam or an execution. Each new day, if I hear it break from the bed of my sweet oblivion, seems like the day of a great event in my life that I won’t have the courage to face. Each new day, if I feel it rise from its bed of shadows as linens fall in the lanes and streets, comes to summon me to a court of law. Each new day, I’m going to be judged. And the man in me who is perpetually condemned clings to his bed as to the mother he lost, and fondles the pillow as if his nursemaid could protect him from people.

The happy sleep of the hulking animal shaded by trees, the balmy fatigue of the tramp lying in the tall grass, the torpor of the black man on a warm and far-away afternoon, the pleasure of the yawn that weighs in tired eyes, everything that helps us to forget and brings sleep, the peace of mind that gently closes the shutters of our soul’s window, the anonymous caress of slumber…

To sleep, to be far away, remote without knowing it, to forget with one’s very body, to have the freedom of unconsciousness like a refuge on a forgotten lake, stagnating among thick foliage in the hidden depths of forests…

A nothingness that breathes, a mild death from which we awaken
fresh and nostalgic, a deep forgetting that massages the tissues of our soul…

And again I hear, like the renewed protest of one who still isn’t convinced, the abrupt clamour of rain spattering the lit-up universe. I feel a chill in my imagined bones, as if I were afraid. And cowering in my insignificance, so human and alone in the last vestige of the darkness that’s deserting me, I begin to weep. I weep, yes, over solitude and life, and my useless grief lies like a wheelless cart on the edge of reality, amid the dung of oblivion. I weep over everything – the loss of the lap where I once lay, the death of the hand I was given, the arms to embrace me that I never found, the shoulder to lean on that I never had. And the day that breaks definitively, the grief that breaks in me like the naked truth of day, all that I dreamed or thought or forgot – all of this, like an amalgam of shadows, fictions and regrets, blends into the wake of the passing worlds and falls among the things of life like the skeleton of a bunch of grapes, filched by young boys and eaten on the street corner.

The noise of the human day suddenly increases, like the sound of a bell that’s calling. I hear, inside the building, the softly clicking latch of the first door that opens for someone to go out and live. I hear slippers in an absurd hallway leading to my heart. And with a brusque movement, as when a man finally succeeds in killing himself, I throw off the snug covers that shelter my stiff body. I’ve woken up. The sound of the rain fades, moving higher in the indefinite outdoors. I feel better. I’ve fulfilled something or other. I get up, go to the window, and open the shutters with brave determination. A day of clear rain floods my eyes with dull light. I open the window. The cool air moistens my warm skin. It’s raining, yes, but although it’s the same rain I’d been hearing, it’s after all so much less! I want to be refreshed, to live, and I lean my neck out to life as to an enormous yoke.*

A rural calm sometimes visits the city. There are times in sunny Lisbon, especially at midday in summer, when the countryside invades us like a wind. And we sleep peacefully right here, on the Rua dos Douradores.

How refreshing for the soul to see a hush fall, beneath a high, steady sun, over these carts full of straw, these half-built crates, and these unhurried pedestrians who suddenly seem to be walking in a village! I myself, alone in the office and looking at them through the window, am transported: I’m in a quiet little town in the country, or stagnating in an unknown hamlet, and because I feel other, I’m happy.

I know: if I raise my eyes, I’ll be confronted by the dingy row of buildings opposite, by the grimy windows of all the downtown offices, by the incongruous windows of the upper floors where people still live, and by the eternal laundry hanging in the sun between the gables at the top, among flowerpots and plants. I know this, but the golden light shining on everything is so soft, and the calm air surrounding me so devoid of sense, that even what I see is no reason to renounce my make-believe village, my rural small town whose commerce is sheer tranquillity.

I know, I know… It is indeed time for lunch, or for resting, or for doing nothing. Everything is going smoothly on the surface of life. Even I am sleeping, although my body is leaning over the balcony as over the rail of a ship sailing past an unfamiliar landscape. Even I have put my mind to rest, as if I were in the country. And suddenly something else looms before me, surrounds me, commands me: I see, behind the small town’s midday, all of life in all of the small town; I see the grand stupid happiness of its domestic life, the grand stupid happiness of life in the fields, the grand stupid happiness of peaceful squalor. I see it because I see it. But I didn’t see it and I wake up. I look around, smiling, and the first thing I do is shake off the dust from my unfortunately dark suit, whose sleeves had been leaning on the balcony rail which no one has ever cleaned, unaware that one day, if only for a moment, it would have to serve as a deck rail (where there could logically be no dust) of a ship on an infinite sightseeing cruise.

Against the blue made pale by the green of night, the cold unevenness of the buildings on the summer horizon formed a jagged, brownish-black silhouette, vaguely haloed by a yellowed grey.

In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization.

… the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they’re happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they’re sad.

I’m writing on a Sunday, the morning far advanced, on a day full of soft light in which, above the rooftops of the interrupted city, the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the mysterious existence of stars into oblivion.

In me it is also Sunday…

My heart is also going to a church, located it doesn’t know where. It wears a child’s velvet suit, and its face, made rosy by first impressions, smiles without sad eyes above the collar that’s too big.

Every morning of that lingering summer the sky, when it woke up, was a dull green-blue, which soon changed to a blueness greyed by a silent white. In the west, however, the sky was the colour we usually ascribe to all of it.

When they feel the ground sliding beneath their feet, then how many men begin to speak the truth, to seek and find, to deny the world’s illusion! And how their illustrious names mark with capital letters –
like those found on maps – the insights of sober and learned pages!

Cosmorama of things happening tomorrow that could never have ever happened! Lapis lazuli of intermittent emotions! Do you remember how many memories can spring from a false supposition, from mere imagination? And in a delirium sprinkled with certainties, the soft, brisk murmur of all the water from all parks wells up as an emotion from the depths of my self-awareness. The old benches are vacant, and all around them the paths spread their melancholy of empty streets.

Night in Heliopolis! Night in Heliopolis! Who will tell me the useless words? Who, through blood and indecision, will compensate me?

High in the nocturnal solitude an anonymous lamp flourishes behind a window. All else that I see in the city is dark, save where feeble reflections of light hazily ascend from the streets and cause a pallid, inverse moonlight to hover here and there. The buildings’ various colours, or shades of colours, are hardly distinguishable in the blackness of the night; only vague, seemingly abstract differences break the regularity of the congested ensemble.

An invisible thread links me to the unknown owner of the lamp. It’s not the mutual circumstance of us both being awake; in this there can be no reciprocity, for my window is dark, so that he cannot see me. It’s something else, something all my own that’s related to my feeling of isolation, that participates in the night and in the silence, and that chooses the lamp as an anchor because it’s the only anchor there is. It seems to be its glowing that makes the night so dark. It seems to be the fact I’m awake, dreaming in the dark, that makes the lamp shine.

Everything that exists perhaps exists because something else exists. Nothing is, everything coexists – perhaps that’s how it really is. I feel I wouldn’t exist right now – or at least wouldn’t exist in the way I’m existing, with this present consciousness of myself, which, because it is consciousness and present, is entirely me in this moment – if that lamp weren’t shining somewhere over there, a useless lighthouse with
a specious advantage of height. I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing. Nothing, nothing, part of the night and the silence and what I share with them of vacancy, of negativity, of in-betweenness, a gap between me and myself, something forgotten by some god or other…

In one of those spells of sleepless somnolence when we intelligently amuse ourselves without the intelligence, I reread some of the pages that together will form my book of random impressions. And they give off, like a familiar smell, an arid impression of monotony. Even while saying that I’m always different, I feel that I’ve always said the same thing; that I resemble myself more than I’d like to admit; that, when the books are balanced, I’ve had neither the joy of winning nor the emotion of losing. I’m the absence of a balance of myself, the lack of a natural equilibrium, and this weakens and distresses me.

Everything, all that I’ve written, is grey. My life, even my mental life, has been like a drizzly day in which everything is non-occurrence and haziness, empty privilege and forgotten purpose. I agonize in tattered silks. In the light and in tedium I see but don’t know myself.

My humble attempt to say at least who I am, to record like a machine of nerves the slightest impressions of my subjective and ultra-sensitive life – this was all emptied like a bucket that got knocked over, and it poured across the ground like the water of everything. I fashioned myself out of false colours, and the result is an attic made out to be an empire. My heart, out of which I spun the great events of prose I lived, seems to me today – in these pages written long ago and reread now with a different soul – like a water pump on a homestead, instinctively installed and pressed into service. I shipwrecked on an unstormy sea where my feet could have touched bottom.