The Book of Disquiet (31 page)

With what horrible clarity even I, as I walk here and think these thoughts, feel distant, alien, confused and.....

I end my solitary peregrination. A vast silence, impassive to slight
sounds, assaults and overwhelms me. In both body and spirit I feel sorely weary of things, all things, of simply being here, of
finding myself in this present state. I almost catch myself wanting to scream because of a feeling that I’m sinking in an ocean of
whose immensity has nothing to do with the infinity of space or the eternity of time, nor with anything that can be measured and named. In these moments of supremely silent terror, I don’t know what I materially am, what I normally do, what I usually want, feel and think. I feel cut off from myself, outside of my reach. The moral impulse to struggle, the intellectual effort to systematize and understand, the restless artistic yearning to produce something that I no longer fathom but that I remember having fathomed and that I call beauty – all of this vanishes from my sense of reality, all of this strikes me as not even worthy of being considered useless, empty and remote. I feel like a mere void, the illusion of a soul, the locus of a being, a conscious darkness where a strange insect
vainly seeks at least the warm memory of a light.

220

D
OLOROUS
I
NTERLUDE

What good is dreaming?

What did I make of myself? Nothing.

To be spiritualized in Night.....

Inner Statue without contours, Outer Dream without a dream-essence.

221

I’ve always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I’ve always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand,
called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.

If it weren’t for my continuous dreaming, my perpetual state of alienation, I could very well call myself a realist – someone, that is, for whom the outer world is an independent nation. But I prefer not to give myself a name, to be somewhat mysterious about what I am and to be impishly unpredictable even to myself.

I feel a certain duty to dream continuously since, not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself, I have to put on the best show I can. And so I fashion myself out of gold and silks, in imaginary rooms, on a false stage, with ancient scenery: a dream created to invisible music and the play of soft lights.

I cherish, like the memory of a special kiss, my childhood remembrance of a theatre with a bluish, moonlit setting that depicted the terrace of an impossible palace, surrounded by a huge park, likewise painted. I spent my soul living all of that as though it were real. The music that softly played on this occasion of my mental experience of life gave the stage setting a feverish reality.

The setting was definitely bluish and moonlight, but I don’t remember who appeared on stage. The play I place today in that remembered scenery comes from the verses of Verlaine and Pessanha,* but this isn’t the play (which I’ve forgotten) that was performed on the actual stage and had nothing to do with that reality of blue music. It’s my own, fluid play, a grandiose moonlit masquerade, a silver and nocturnal blue interlude.

Then came life. That night they took me to The Gold Lion* for dinner. I can still taste the steaks on the palate of my nostalgia – steaks (I know because I imagine*) such as nowadays no one makes or I, at any rate, don’t eat. And it all gets mixed up – the childhood I live from afar, the tasty food at the restaurant, the moonlit setting, Verlaine future and I present – in a blurry diagonal, in a false gap between what I was and what I am.

222

As when a storm is brewing and the noises from the street talk in a loud and detached voice…

The street winced in the stark white light, and the dull darkness trembled all around the world with a boom of echoing crashes. The harsh sadness of the heavy rain accentuated the air’s ugly black hue. Cold and warm and hot at the same time, the air was everywhere equivocal. Then a wedge of metallic light entered the large office, ripping into the peace of each human body, and a huge rock of sound struck with a chill shock on all sides, shattering into a hard silence. The sound of rain diminishes, becoming a soft voice. The noise from the street diminishes out of fear. A new light spreads its swift yellow over the silent darkness, but breathing was again possible before the fist of rumbling sound abruptly echoed from afar; like an angry farewell, the storm was beginning to draw away.

…with a drawling, moribund murmur, with no light in the increasing light, the rumble of the storm subsided in the distant expanses – it circled over Almada*…

A dreadful light suddenly cracked and splintered. It froze inside every brain and chamber. Everything froze. Hearts stopped for a moment. They’re all very sensitive people. The silence terrifies, as if death had struck. The sound of increasing rain, as if everything were weeping, is a relief. The air is like lead.

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A sword of faint lightning darkly whirled in the large room. The rumble that followed, breaking in on a widespread gulp, trailed off into the distance. The sound of rain wept loudly, like mourners in between their chit-chatting. Here inside, each tiny sound stood out clearly, nervously.

224

…that episode of the imagination which we call reality.

It’s been raining for two straight days, and the rain that falls from the cold grey sky has a colour that afflicts my soul. For two straight days… I’m sad from feeling, and I reflect it at the window, to the sound of the dripping water and pouring rain. My heart is overwhelmed, and my memories have turned into anxieties.

Though I don’t feel tired and have no reason to feel tired, I’d love to go to sleep right now. Back when I was a child and happy, the voice of a colourful green parrot lived in a house off the courtyard next door. On rainy days his talking never became mournful, and he would cry out – sure of his shelter – a constant sentiment that hovered in the sadness like a phonograph before its time.

Did I think about this parrot because I’m sad and my distant childhood brings it to mind? No, I actually thought about it because a parrot is right now frantically squawking in the courtyard opposite where I live today.

Everything is topsy-turvy. When it seems like I’m remembering, I’m thinking of something else; if I look, I don’t recognize, and when distracted, I see clearly.

I turn my back to the grey window with its panes that are cold to the touch, and by some magic of the penumbra I suddenly see the interior of our old house, next to which there was a courtyard with a squawking parrot; and my eyes fall asleep from the irrevocable fact of having, in effect, lived.

225

Yes, it’s the sunset. Slowly and distractedly I reach the end of the Rua da Alfândega and see, beyond the Terreiro do Paço,* a clear view of the sunless western sky. It’s a blue sky tinged green and tending towards light grey, and on the left, over the hills of the opposite bank, there’s
a cowering mass of brownish to lifeless pink fog. An immense peace that I don’t have is coldly present in the abstract fall air. Not having it, I experience the feeble pleasure of imagining it exists. But in reality there is no peace nor lack of peace, just sky, a sky with every fading colour: light blue, blue-green, pale grey between green and blue, fuzzy hues of distant clouds that aren’t clouds, yellowishly darkened by an expiring red. And all of this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite.

I feel and forget. A nostalgia – the same one that everyone feels for everything – invades me as if it were an opium in the cold air. I have an inner, pseudo-ecstasy that comes from seeing.

Towards the ocean, where the sun’s ceasing becomes increasingly final, the light dies out in a livid white which is blued by greenish cold. In the air there’s a torpor of what is never achieved. The panorama of the sky loudly hushes.

In this moment when I’m bursting with feeling, I wish I had the gift of ruthless self-expression, the arbitrary whim of a style as my destiny. But no: this remote, lofty sky that’s disintegrating is everything right now, and the emotion I feel, which is many confused emotions bunched together, is merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me – a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves.

So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel – to feel anguish just because it’s a feeling, restlessness because I’m here, nostalgia for something I’ve never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external self-awareness.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the
empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison – since you’re infinite, there’s no escaping you!

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Ah, what transcendental
sensuousness when at night, walking along the city streets and staring from within my soul at the building façades, all the structural differences, the architectural details, the lit windows, the potted plants that make each balcony unique – yes, looking at all this, what instinctive joy I felt when to the lips of my consciousness came this shout of redemption. But none of this is real!