The gravest accusation against Romanticism has still not been made: that it plays out the inner truth of human nature. Its excesses, its absurdities and its ability to seduce and move hearts all come from its being the outer representation of what’s deepest in the soul – a concrete, visible representation that would even be possible, if human possibility depended on something besides Fate.
Even I, who laugh at these seductions that play on the mind, very often catch myself thinking how nice it would be to be famous, how pleasant to be doted on, how colourful to be triumphant! But I’m unable to envision myself in these lofty roles without a hearty snicker from the other I that’s always near by, like a downtown street. See myself famous? What I see is a famous bookkeeper. Feel myself raised to the thrones of renown? It happens in the office on the Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues ruin the scene. Hear myself cheered by swarming crowds? The cheering reaches me in my rented room on the fourth floor and collides with the shabby furniture and the banality that humiliates me from the kitchen to my dreams. I didn’t even have castles in Spain, like the Spanish grandees of all illusions. My castles were made of old, grubby playing cards from an incomplete deck that could never be used to play anything; they didn’t even fall but had to be knocked down by the impatient hand of the old maid, who wanted to put back the tablecloth that had been pulled to one side, because the hour for tea had struck like a curse from Fate. But even this vision is flawed, for I have neither the house in the country nor the elderly aunts, at whose table I might sip a relaxing cup of tea at the end of an evening with the family. My dream even failed in its metaphors and depictions. My empire didn’t even happen among the old playing cards. My march of triumph didn’t get as far as a teapot or an old cat. I’ll die as I’ve lived, amid all the junk on the outskirts, sold by weight among the postscripts of the broken.
May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of my disillusion like that of a great dream, and the splendour of not believing like a banner of defeat: a banner in feeble hands, but still and all a banner, dragged through mud and the blood of the weak but raised high for who knows what reason – whether in defiance, or as a challenge, or in mere desperation – as we vanish into quicksand. No one knows for what reason, because no one knows anything, and the sand swallows those with banners as it swallows those without. And the sand covers everything: my life, my prose, my eternity.
I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.
55
However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors. The very sparseness by which their clarity is expressed comforts me in some strange way. From them I get a joyful sense of expansive life that contemplates large open spaces without actually travelling through them. Even the pagan gods take a rest from the unknown.
The obsessive analysis of our sensations (sometimes of merely imagined sensations), the identification of our heart with the landscape, the anatomic exposure of all our nerves, the substitution of desire for the will and of longing for thinking – all these things are far too familiar to be of interest to me or to give me peace when expressed by another. Whenever I feel them, and precisely because I feel them, I wish I were feeling something else. And when I read a classical author, that something else is given to me.
I frankly and unblushingly admit it: there’s not a passage of Chateaubriand or a canto of Lamartine – passages that often seem to be the voice of my own thoughts, cantos that often seem to have been written for me to know myself – that transports and uplifts me like a passage of Vieira’s prose,* or like certain odes by one of our few classical writers who truly followed Horace.
I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by grape-vines.
I read as one who abdicates. And since the royal crown and robe are never as grand as when the departing king leaves them on the ground, I lay all my trophies of tedium and dreaming on the tiled floor of my antechambers, then climb the staircase with no other nobility but that of seeing.
I read as one who’s passing through. And it’s in classical writers, in the calm-spirited, in those who if they suffer don’t mention it, that I feel like a holy transient, an anointed pilgrim, a contemplator for no reason of a world with no purpose, Prince of the Great Exile, who as he was leaving gave the last beggar the ultimate alms of his desolation.
56
The firm’s monied partner, chronically afflicted by a vague illness, decided on a whim during one of his healthy respites to have a group portrait made of the office personnel. And so the day before yesterday a cheerful photographer lined us all up against the grimy white partition, made of flimsy wood, that divides the main office from the private one of Senhor Vasques. In the middle was Vasques himself; flanking him in a definite, then indefinite, ranking by category were the other human souls that daily come together here as one body to accomplish small tasks whose ultimate objective is the secret of the Gods.
Today when I arrived at the office, a little late and having quite forgotten the static event of the twice-taken photograph, I found Moreira (unusually early for him) and one of the sales representatives furtively leaning over some blackish sheets, which I recognized with a start as the first proofs of the photographs. In fact they were two proofs of the same shot, the one that had turned out better.
I suffered the truth on seeing myself there, since my face was of course the first one I looked for. I’ve never had a flattering notion of my physical appearance, but I never felt it to be more insignificant than there, next to the familiar faces of my colleagues, in that line-up of daily expressions. I look like a nondescript Jesuit. My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of that lifeless tide of faces. Lifeless, no. There are some truly expressive physiognomies there. Senhor Vasques looks just like himself – broad, cheerful face with hard features and a steady gaze, completed by his stiff moustache. The man’s shrewdness and energy – banal enough, and recurring in thousands of men throughout the world – are nevertheless inscribed on that photograph as on a psychological passport. The two travelling salesmen look sharp, and the local sales representative turned out well, though he’s half hidden by Moreira’s shoulder. And Moreira! Moreira, my supervisor, the epitome of monotonous constancy, looks much more alive than I! Even the office boy (and here I’m unable to repress a feeling that I tell myself isn’t envy) has a forthrightness of expression that is smiles away from my blank effacement, reminiscent of a sphinx from the stationer’s.*
What does this mean? What is this truth that film doesn’t mistake? What is this certainty that a cold lens documents? Who am I, that I should look like that? Anyway… And the insult of the whole ensemble?
‘You came out really well,’ Moreira said suddenly. And then, turning to the sales representative: ‘It’s his spitting image – don’t you think?’ And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin.
57
And today, thinking about what my life has been, I feel like some sort of animal that’s being carried in a basket under a curved arm between two suburban train stations. The image is stupid, but the life it defines is even more stupid. These baskets usually have two lids, like half ovals, that lift up at one end or the other should the animal squirm. But the arm of the one carrying it, resting a bit on the hinges in the middle, won’t allow such a weak thing to do more than slightly and uselessly raise the lids, like tired wings of a butterfly.
I forgot that I was talking about
me in the description of the basket. I clearly see it, along with the fat, sunburned arm of the maid carrying it. I can’t see any more of the maid than her arm and its down. I can’t get comfortable unless – All of a sudden a breezy coolness [passes through] those white rods and strips which baskets are made of and inside of which I squirm, an animal aware that it’s going from one station to another. I’m resting on what seems to be a long seat, and I hear people talking outside my basket. All is calm and so I sleep, until I’m lifted up again at the station.
58
The environment is the soul of things. Each thing has its own expression and this expression comes from outside it. Each thing is the intersection of three lines, and these three lines form the thing: a certain quantity of material, the way in which we interpret it, and the environment it’s in. This table on which I’m writing is a block of wood, it’s the table, and it’s a piece of furniture among others in the room. My impression of this table, if I wish to transcribe it, will be composed of the notions that it is made of wood, that I call it a table and attribute certain uses to it, and that it receives, reflects and is transformed by the objects placed on top of it, in whose juxtaposition it has an external soul. And its very colour, the fading of that colour, its spots and cracks – all came from outside it, and this (more than its wooden essence) is what gives it its soul. And the core of that soul, its being a table, also came from the outside, which is its personality.
I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it’s every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It’s every bit as erroneous to say that things possess colour, form, perhaps even being. This ocean is saltwater. This sunset is the initial diminishing of sunlight in this particular latitude and longitude. This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells – better yet, he’s a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature.
Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body.
In these considerations there may be an entire philosophy for someone with the strength to draw conclusions. It won’t be me. Lucid vague thoughts and logical possibilities occur to me, but they all dim in the vision of a ray of sunlight that gilds a pile of dung like wetly squished dark straw, on the almost black soil next to a stone wall.
That’s how I am. When I want to think, I look. When I want to descend into my soul, I suddenly freeze, oblivious, at the top of the long spiral staircase, looking through the upper-storey window at the sun that bathes the sprawling mass of rooftops in a tawny farewell.
59
Whenever my ambition, influenced by my dreams, raised up above the everyday level of my life, so that for a moment I seemed to soar, like a child on a swing, I always – like the child – had to come down to the public garden and face my defeat, with no flags to wave in battle and no sword I was strong enough to unsheathe.
I suppose that most of the people I chance to pass in the street also feel – I notice it in their silently moving lips and in their eyes’ vague uncertainty, or in the sometimes raised voice of their joint mumbling – like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war. And probably all of them – I turn around to see their slumping, defeated-looking shoulders – share with me this sense of salesmanly squalor, of being no more than humiliatingly vanquished stragglers amid reeds and scum, with no moonlight over the shores or poetry in the marshes.
Like me, they have an exalted and sad heart. I know them all. Some are shop assistants, others are office workers, and still others are small businessmen. Then there are the conquerors from the bars and cafés, unwittingly sublime in the ecstasy of their self-centred chatter, or content to remain self-centredly silent, with no need to defend what they’re too stingy to say. But they’re all poets, poor devils, who drag past my eyes, as I drag past theirs, the same sorry sight of our common incongruity. They all have, like me, their future in the past.
At this very moment, idle and alone in the office, because everyone else went to lunch, I’m staring through the grimy window at an old man who’s slowly teetering down the other side of the street. He’s not drunk; he’s dreaming. He’s attentive to what doesn’t exist. Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial. Today, because I’m still young, I can dream of South Sea islands and impossible Indias. Tomorrow perhaps the same Gods will make me dream of owning a small tobacco shop, or of retiring to a house in the suburbs. Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.
While thinking about this, I forgot about the old man. Now I don’t see him. I open the window to get a better look, but he’s not there. He left. For me he had the visual mission of a symbol; having finished his mission, he turned the corner. If I were told that he’d turned the absolute corner and was never here, I would accept it with the same gesture I’m about to employ to close the window.
Succeed?…
Poor salesmanly demigods who conquer empires with lofty words and intentions but need to scrounge up money for food and the rent! They’re like the troops of a disbanded army whose commanders had a glorious dream, which in them – now trudging through the scum of marshes – has been reduced to a vague notion of grandeur, the consciousness of having belonged to an army, and the vacuity of not even knowing what the commander they never saw had ever done.
Each of them, for a moment, has dreamed he’s the commander of the army whose rear guard he deserted. Each of them, from the sludge of streams, has hailed the victory which no one could win and which left only crumbs on the stained tablecloth that nobody remembered to shake.
They fill in the cracks of daily activity like dust in the cracks of badly dusted furniture. In normal, ordinary daylight they shine like grey worms against the reddish mahogany. They can be removed with a thin nail, but no one has the patience to bother.
My hapless peers with their lofty dreams – how I envy and despise them! I’m with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I’m with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.
Some are heroes who flattened five men on a street corner just yesterday. Others are seducers to whom even non-existent women have surrendered. They believe these things when they tell them, and perhaps they tell them so as to believe. Others ..... For them the world’s conquerors, whoever they may be, are everyday people.
And like eels in a wooden tub, they slither under and over each other, without ever leaving the tub. Sometimes they’re mentioned in the newspapers. Some of them are mentioned rather often. But they never become famous.
These people are happy, for they’ve been given the enchanted dream of stupidity. But those, like me, who’ve been given dreams without illusions .....
60
DOLOROUS INTERLUDE
Should you ask me if I’m happy, I’ll answer that I’m not.
61
It’s noble to be timid, illustrious to fail to act, sublime to be inept at living.
Only Tedium, which is a withdrawal, and Art, which is a disdain, gild with a semblance of contentment our .....
The will-o’-the-wisps generated by our rotting lives are at least a light in our darkness.
Only unhappiness is elevating, and only the te
dium that comes from unhappiness is heraldic like the descendants of ancient heroes.
I’m a well of gestures that haven’t even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven’t even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end.
I’m the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins, whose builder, halfway through, got tired of thinking about what he was building.
Let’s not forget to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy, and to despise those who are happy, because we didn’t know how to be happy like them. This false disdain and feeble hatred are merely the plinth – rough-hewn and dirtied by the soil where it stands – for the unique and haughty statue of our Tedium, a dark figure whose inscrutable smile gives its face a vague aura of mystery.
Blessed are those who entrust their lives to no one.
62
I’m physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is. And sometimes I wilfully aggravate the nausea, like someone who induces vomiting to be relieved of the urge to vomit.
One of my favourite strolls, on mornings when I dread the banality of the approaching day as if I were dreading jail, is to walk slowly past the still unopened shops and stores, listening to the scraps of conversation that groups of young women or young men, or women with men, let fall – like ironic alms – in the invisible school of my open-air meditation.
And it’s always the same succession of the same old phrases… ‘And then she said…,’ and the tone foreshadows the intrigue to follow. ‘If it wasn’t him, it was you…,’ and the voice that answers bristles in a protest already out of my hearing range. ‘You said it, yes sir, I heard you…,’ and the seamstress’s shrill voice declares ‘My mother says she’s not interested…’ ‘Me?’, and the astonishment of the fellow carrying a lunch wrapped in white paper doesn’t convince me, and probably not the dirty blonde either. ‘It must have been…,’ and the giggling of three of the four girls drowns out the obscenity that ..... ‘And then I walked straight up to the guy, and right in his face, but I mean right in his face, José, just imagine…,’ and the poor devil is lying, because the office supervisor – I can tell by the voice that the other contender was the supervisor of the office in question – wouldn’t receive the straw gladiator’s challenge in the arena surrounded by desks. ‘And then I went and smoked in the bathroom…’ laughs the little boy with dark patches on his trouser-seat.