Great Shadow E-Book

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Decadence from Dedalus
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 338

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

One novella and 6 stories dealing with identity and solitude

Das E-Book Great Shadow wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

The Translator

Foreword

I

The Great Shadow

Resurrection

II

Myself the Other

The Strange Death of Professor Antena

Mystery

The Man of Dreams

Wings

The Fixer of Moments

Copyright

THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992 and for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersao in 2012, and her translations of Eca de Queiroz’s novels The Relic (1996) and The City and the Mountains (2009) were shortlisted for the prize; with Javier Marias, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000, she won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Jose Saramago’s All the Names. In 2008 she won the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eca de Queiroz.

She has translated the following books for Dedalus: The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui and The River by Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, Lucio’s Confession and The Great Shadow by Mario de Sa-Carneiro, The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy (with Annella McDermott), The Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy (eds. Eugenio Lisboa and Helder Macedo), Spring and Summer Sonatas and Autumn and Winter Sonatas by Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and, by Eca de Queiroz: The Mandarin, The Relic, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, The Crime of Father Amaro, Cousin Bazilio, The Maias, The City and the Mountains, Alves& Co. and The Mystery of the Sintra Road.

Margaret Jull Costa is currently translating The Illustrious House of Ramires by Eca de Queiroz.

‘What if it is a disease?’ he decided at last. ‘What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analysed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection …?’

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by David Magarshack)

Foreword

Mário de Sá-Carneiro was born in Lisbon in 1890 and died in Paris in 1916. He seems to have been travelling swiftly towards death from the moment his mother died when he was two and a half. Subsequently, he was by turns pampered and neglected by a steadfast if over-anxious nanny and a wealthy, globetrotting father. Childhood was a prison for him. Photos taken when he was eight years old show a fat-cheeked, unutterably world-weary little boy. In an early short story he wrote: ‘I genuinely feel as if they had smeared my body with a layer of very thick plaster that inhibits all movement and atrophies my muscles.’ Of another character, a young girl, he wrote: ‘The child is given over to the care of strangers, she lives in the kitchen with the servants. She becomes aloof, demoralised before her time, devoid of delicate feelings.’

When Sá-Carneiro was still at school, his best friend (who had also lost his mother at an early age) shot himself in the head. He did this in front of teachers and fellow students. Sá-Carneiro, whilst obviously deeply shocked by his friend’s death, was also impressed by the theatricality of his suicide. In a poem he wrote at the time, he praised his friend’s courage and rebuked himself for his own cowardice, his ‘existing without living’.

The short stories he wrote between eighteen and twenty-one have two themes only – suicide and madness. Marriage is merely an act of folly, sex a peculiarly repellent pastime, and procreation a crime, since, through it, parents condemn their children to life. His friend and literary executor, the poet Fernando Pessoa, excluded these early stories from Sá-Carneiro’s complete works as being unworthy and unrepresentative.

Like many other Portuguese artists and writers, Sá-Carneiro considered Paris to be the centre of the cultural world, a place where life could be lived intensely and freely. In Resurrection he likens Paris to ‘a great salon brilliantly lit’ and Lisbon to ‘a narrow yellow house’. However, when, in 1912, he realised his dream of going to live in Paris, he was only slightly less bored than he was in Lisbon. He described himself sitting in cafés waiting for life, ‘which never turns up’. And yet, despite this inertia, this ennui, his letters to Fernando Pessoa are full of news about stories and poems he has written or is about to write; they are full of life, plans for the future, a future he cannot really believe he will inhabit.

Sá-Carneiro collapsed into hysteria and incoherence when he saw enforced adulthood looming on the horizon. His father had become involved with a prostitute and ended up marrying her. Having squandered most of his fortune on travel and the good life for the last twenty-four years, his father was obliged to take a job in Mozambique (then still a Portuguese colony) from where it was very difficult to send money to Paris. His second wife apparently wielded considerable influence over him and was clearly impatient with her plump, spoiled stepson’s inability to fend for himself. Thus Mário was faced not only with the ignominy of having an ex-prostitute for a stepmother, but also with the prospect of losing his allowance and having to return to provincial Lisbon. Or perhaps he just needed a satisfactory excuse finally to ‘disappear’ and lack of money was as good a reason as any. Despite the endless rehearsals for death in his short stories, his own suicide was not the golden moment he so often describes; it was a piece of bungled theatre. He took a large quantity of strychnine and died alone and in excruciating pain, the unwitting friend he had invited to keep him company in death having rushed off in search of a doctor.

The stories in this collection were all written during Sá-Carneiro’s time in Paris. (The title Sá-Carneiro gave to the collection was Céu em fogo [The Sky Ablaze] probably a reference to Baudelaire’s phrase ‘cieux embrasés’ in Le voyage.) The stories buzz with the same kind of energy – negative and positive – evident in his letters. His protagonists’ lives may be brief but they are intense. They share his distaste for the banal and the ordinary, his longing for some supreme experience that will fill the void inside. Achieving one’s goal, reaching perfection or finding the ideal lover all culminate in death: the leap into the dark, the golden-winged secret, the great shadow. When reality becomes too pressingly real, there are always the escape routes of madness and suicide. His characters, however, always have fairly grand reasons for their retreats into insanity and self-murder – they have written the perfect poem, they are being pursued by a dark alter ego, they have found a way of travelling through time.

Suicide, madness and death are the key themes in these stories. The world is a tawdry place to be transcended through art and the imagination. He celebrates the glories of great cities like Paris and Venice, but as seen through a beautiful, hallucinatory haze. Venice is the ‘sacred city of fantasy, brocaded with waking dreams, with magical penumbras – twilight rainbow, early-morning anemone …’ Reality is simply not enough. His characters are constantly struggling to get beyond life – ‘beyond’ being a word that occurs again and again throughout the book – by building a world of dreams, by fixing certain places and moments in their imaginations, by killing themselves or another, even the person they most love, by stepping back in time, by retreating into madness, or, as in Mystery, by becoming so perfectly fused with their lover that they simply die. His characters despise what most people would see as decent, ordinary folk living healthy lives, people ‘who never fly into a rage, who never dare to offend anyone, … who always speak softly and listen intently to what others say … [who] are just, honest, sincere, coherent in all their actions.’ They are the true ‘scoundrels’ not criminals, murderers, drug addicts, who at least have the courage to transgress the limits set by society. Sá-Carneiro sees the artist – and all his heroes are artists – as, by nature, a transgressor who cannot, therefore, expect to feel at home in the world.

Sá-Carneiro blended the Futurists’ exclamatory style and love of speed and all things modern with the lavish vocabulary of the decadents, their fusing of sex and death, their search for sensation, but the stories are more than just a combination of literary styles. They are painful, and often exhilarating, explorations of what he sees as the very narrow range of options open to a sensitive soul. Like the fat, sullen child imprisoned in his own flesh, Sá-Carneiro’s heroes pace their cells, but always hit against the wall of their guilt or their failure or their self-disgust; death, in whatever guise it comes, is a release.

As with his short novel Lúcio’s Confession (1914, Dedalus 1993), one is often conscious that this is a young man’s work, but any youthful lack of control is more than made up for by the sheer opulence of the writing. Sensations and emotions flicker and scintillate in the contradictory, synaesthetic universe he creates. Light blooms and blossoms or is ‘like a torrent of black agate’, someone has ‘a young crystalline voice that sounds as if it were muffled by black crepes and silks’, sounds have smells and colours can be felt, fears are ‘silvery’, sleep ‘jade-green’, women are convulsed ‘in jasper waves of ecstasy’.

The reverse side of this opulence is the desolation, the ‘invincible drowsiness’ that afflicts his characters, whose souls are likened to ‘a vast house in winter, cluttered with furniture draped in sacking, and with open windows through which the sibilant wind rushed in’. We are left, after reading the stories, with the unsettling sense of someone simultaneously embracing and recoiling from life.

Margaret Jull Costa

THE GREAT SHADOW

For Fernando Pessoa

The Great Shadow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

Gérard de Nerval

I

December 1905

Oh, mystery.

This obsession has troubled me since infancy – its charm makes me swoon …

In the big bedroom where I used to sleep, I would spend long, fearful hours before finally drifting off in the undulating, hesitant light of the oil lamp they left lit for me on the bedside table. I was afraid that the shadows might suddenly stop being shadows and come to life, and that monsters, shadowy monsters, would leap on me and tug at me, mouths gaping.

Now I recall those remote moments of childhood fear with nostalgia, because then, though I suffered, at least my fever wore bright colours, had a kind of marbled voluptuousness. During the day, I would grow bored playing always with the same toys, and I would be filled with sinuous longings for the night and for my own silvery fears beating inside it.

From my bed, I would imagine great houses plunged in darkness, houses I had never entered and which, nevertheless, I would have found perfectly familiar had I visited them in daylight; I would recreate them in the silence and the gloom, fantastic, terrifying and marvellous. I would think: ‘How wonderful to walk through that solitude, to touch the objects they contain!’ I would imagine getting up out of my small white cot and setting off to visit them, stealthily, barefoot, so that the servants would not hear; but my terror was always stronger than my desire. I would hide my head under the sheets, even in summer, until I forgot and fell deep asleep.

Vast houses plunged in darkness …

Even today I cannot enter them without a tremor, and I always avoid having to walk through their rooms.

Intellectually, I know that there is nothing ghostly there, no magical vibrations, no lurking signs of witchcraft, yet I am still afraid. They make me think of ghosts … cold triangles … naked swords … bands of varicoloured fire.

I tremble and hesitate. I draw back …

The peerless opulence of the mystery!

Yes, ever since I was a child I have known that the only way one could make life truly, glitteringly beautiful, with battlements of ivory and gold, would be somehow to link it to the mystery, to include it in that mystery. But how?

By seeking, by going down into the darkness, by imperially piling enigma on enigma. Ah, I have sought in vain for secrets with which to anoint my existence, to immortalise it with Shadow. Everything around me is so certain, more than certain, irremediably real. Only my imagination manages to tremble with mysteries, mysteries that are just so much smoke – obscure, mythical enchantments.

The light always shines above me, the light of rough, material certainty.

That was what it was like in childhood too. Only in my fantasies was I afraid, only in them was I sensitive to the delicious, disquieting charm of trap doors, tunnels (if they spoke to me of some ancient palace), of bridges, domes, great arches, just as I sometimes had a chill, tenuous recollection of black aqueducts which, of course, I had never seen.

There was in our house a strange attic which, during my childhood years, became for me the focus of a whole mysterious world.

That attic – which I had glimpsed but once, and then only vaguely – had no actual floor. It was, I now conclude, merely a void between the upper ceiling of the house and the roof, one part of the building being higher than the other. Very occasionally, the servants would go up there and do a bit of cleaning, I think. They would perhaps have let me go with them, but I never asked, I was afraid, and I realise now that I was actually afraid of it becoming a reality and thereby losing all its charm.

Ah, but the number of times I went up to the door to listen. The wind whirled in through the cracks, now and then the beams creaked, and in my imagination all that became the beating of black wings, the sweep of powerful currents, the sound of bones cracking, who knows. One day, I even got up the courage to half open the door. Inside, all was thick shadow; then a ray of evening sun, slipping in through a crack, lit up the magical palpitations of a halo of multicoloured specks of dust. Astonished, dazzled by the marvel, I immediately shut the door and fled.

After that, at night, before going to sleep, I would spend hours on end thinking about that attic which, more than ever, had become for me a bizarre, unknown, seductive world. And I created in it, truly created, a whole life. I dreamed it, its woods, its rivers and bridges, its mountains, its oceans, its towns, its inhabitants. I saw its polychrome forests made out of cotton wool, like sequins, like Christmas tree decorations; the mountains were made out of water, the rivers out of precious stones and, above them, in moonlit arches, there were great bridges of stars. I imagined the human beings inhabiting my country to be deformed, plump, picaresque dwarves with violet-coloured eyes and I invented a whole fauna of bizarre animals that defied description: birds with no heads, rabbits with wings, fish with lions’ manes, butterflies that were flowers born out of the earth. For some obscure reason, I deemed the king of this nation to be a great multicoloured ant surrounded by golden mice with silver wings who were the nobles of his court – and I believed it utterly. Only the people were ridiculous homunculi.

This world of my childish imagination formed a mysterious, proliferating whole – indistinct, diffuse, haphazard, impossible to pin down: there was sea where there was also a city, there were royal palaces where there were forests. The most peculiar thing was that in this world in which everything was of such diverse colours, it was, at the same time, grey! Yes, I saw the cotton-wool trees, some white, some purple, blue, scarlet or orange, and the violet eyes of the dwarves, the golden mouse-vassals, the king – the great multicoloured ant – and the rainbow rivers of jewels and the indigo glass mountains, and yet, even as I imagined that infinity of colours, I could not help but see it also as if it were uniformly grey.

Ah, a child’s imagination … where else would you find a more beautiful, more disquieting imagination, one that can so easily connect with the impossible? It is, without a doubt, the best suited to transforming fear, to harbouring vague conjectures, for in that fluctuating period of one’s life, one is pure, credulous fantasy. Later on come reason, lucidity and distrust and then everything vanishes. We are left only with certainty – a sense of hopeless disillusion.

That is why I had the most extraordinary, most troubling experience of my life when I was just eight years old.

We were at our house in the country.

I had never dared walk alone through the garden at night, along the cool paths lined with box hedges, so pleasant and bucolic, where, by day, I would fearlessly run about and play, my cheeks ablaze. From the great courtyard next to the kitchen, though, I would look at those paths opening out in front of me and dream of discovering them on some marvellous night journey. For the truth is that, by night, the garden must be magical. Gnomes would gambol there, and elves; in the great pools, in the moonlight, fairies would bathe, and on the tiled benches – of this I was sure – a whole court of princes and enchanted queens would sit and daydream. Then, what fear I would experience down there, beneath the ancient walnut tree, next to the well, on the edge of which, perhaps, nymphs would disdainfully lean, bewitched and naked.

I dreamed all this with fixed and fascinated eyes, but trembling too, never daring to stray more than a few steps from the kitchen, where there were gossiping servants and plenty of light. I would sleepily dream of this night-time adventure, with a picture book forgotten on my lap, and my eyes would drift once more to the orange grove I could see nearby, wrapped in a pale penumbra, and in which, by sheer force of imagination, I could make out – could really see – the glittering fruits, miraculously turned into golden apples of enchantment.

I had, in fact, already walked the garden paths at night with the caretaker, but that, of course, meant nothing: having someone with me broke the spell. That magical world would only reveal itself to my solitary child’s eyes, I knew that all too well.

In vain I went on dreaming, gripped by an intense desire to escape into the darkness, but I was always fettered by fear.

Until one night, I don’t know quite how it came about, I suddenly closed my eyes and ran wildly out into the garden.

I only opened my eyes after having run for a few minutes, to be sure that I would not turn back. And for a long time, in a fever of fear, rife with mystery, I wandered in the shadows.

My God, how can I possibly describe all the beauty, all the marvels I experienced during that time? Fear itself gave me wings, it both destroyed and gratified me.

What a fantastic scene!

At night, amongst the darkness and the distances, familiar places – the orchards, the vineyards, the threshing floors, the gardens – reared up in terrifyingly different shapes. The paths were lined by the monsters of green fog into which the box trees had been transformed – jolly, kindly monsters, with clownish, lopsided grins – and the pillars supporting the vine trellis gleamed whitely like erect soldiers, soldiers wearing busbies, some smoking pipes, of which the fluttering glowworms were the embers.

Everything was shadow, shifting shadow, subtly and constantly modifying the night landscape.

The trees whispered secrets, their shadows were perhaps witches’ sabbaths, so crimped and crackling was the rustling of their branches in the wind.

(Ah, but that night wind blowing through the reeds did not feel the same as the wind does in daylight hours, it was more fluid; its strange, veiled whistling made it sound to me like the ghost of a wind, a fearful, croaking ghost, full of dull echoes.)

The pools reflected only blackness, because the night was dark, with no moon or stars; they were like hideous pools of pitch, but the coolness emanating from them dissipated that fear, and on the water, if you looked closely, there were a thousand fantastic, indeterminate shapes, carved out of a translucent, barely visible, indigo mist that fluttered, capricious and mysterious.

I kept running.

The roses in the garden provided gentler enchantments, whilst the round, leafy myrtle tree had turned itself into a drooping Chinese bonze venerably crossing his legs, and the lilies had become bells in an ivory tower.

Now I was leaning over the well. Amidst the sound of splashing, the long, black wings of unfamiliar creatures brushed my face. My fear, at that point, was an agony.

Looming in the distance, I could still see a great secret shape, possibly tawny in colour.

I have no idea what happened after that. When I came to, I was back sitting openmouthed on the bench in the pantry, next to the kitchen, with the same picture book on my lap. My favourite companion – the large yellow dog that belonged to the caretaker and which I would harness to my dog-carts – was gently licking my hands …

Yes, those still constitute the greatest moments of my life. I never achieved a more intense illusion, that of penetrating the Shadow and including myself in the Secret. Ah, but on the nights that followed, how my fears grew. I often woke up crying, thrashing around hysterically.

That was when I had the dream for the first time – another of my brightest memories.

In fact, one morning, when I awoke, I remembered perfectly clearly – where, I don’t know, but it happened that night – how a certain queen decked out in brocades had held me on her lap, had opened to me her coffers of precious stones, had unbraided her long, golden hair for me so that I could run my feverish fingers through it, to cool them.

A princess could not exist in my room, not even at night, and I had not left my room. And yet I had spoken to her, I had seen her quite clearly. But where, where? I could almost remember her features, her mouth filled with pearls, her flower-like gestures. There were walls of mist around my eyes.

Finally, embarrassed, I told all this to the maids, but they, distractedly, said only:

‘It was just a dream.’

A dream.

I spent all day – I’ll never forget it – trying to relive that lovely mystery, the magical queen, her rings, her necklaces, the rustling gleam of her dress, her unbraided hair. Perhaps I was in love with her, who knows, but I was, above all, proud of having dreamed her for the first time, of being capable of dreaming her, because I could not believe that such a glory could happen to just anyone.

I never deceived myself like that again. That is why I remember my childhood with a kind of amazed nostalgia.

Although my whole art is intimately bound up with Mystery, I never manage truly to immerse myself in the Beyond. In my books I may have left some shadow, some diademed shadow, but it is the shadow of artifice, a dead, unchanging shadow that does not excite me, a shadow I create, but which does not touch me, one that I cold-bloodedly devise.

Each night, longingly, humbly, I return to my silent, childhood memories, to my miraculous night-time walk, to my fantasy attic, and to the long hours on sunny mornings spent lying on my bed, staring into my own eyelids – that kaleidoscope of illusion – at the discs, arrows, claws, ribbons, stars, multicoloured crescents set in a red penumbra, spinning and sparkling and dappling.

How remote that rich life seems! How great I was then! Then I had a sombre fear of belfries … if there were turrets on a palace, I could only believe in them if there were naked princesses inside, dining on bitter fruits … and I was afraid of thick tapestries, I would shudder at the sight of heavy drapes, hot velvets.

Even today I have not lost that fear of what might lie behind a curtain, just as I am still troubled in ancient palaces by Persian carpets, Arras tapestries, huge unlit chandeliers, dead mirrors.

But it is all quite useless, and so uncertain …

I have an overwhelming desire to plunge myself into the Shadow and actually to experience it, to live it!

II

January 1906

Such a strange enchantment … There is something intensely sexual in the attraction I feel for the Mystery. Whenever I dream or think about it, I do so lost in desire, in the grip of a delicate, spasmodic flow of sensuality, just as memories of water, fire and naked bodies, the sensations of Secrecy, whether real or evoked, all fill me with fluid ecstasies, golden and perverse.

Everything that moves me has become sexualised and it is through sex alone that I sense it, desire it, suffer it. That is why I have always consciously and excitedly catalogued splendid, naked bodies, tumultuous European cities, perfumes, shimmering theatres carpeted in purple, moonlit waterscapes, noisy cafés, restaurants at night, long journeys, the contemporary murmur of vast mills and factories, madness and iced drinks, particular flowers such as violets and camellias, certain fruits, such as pineapples … and strawberries, with their sharp, naked, capricious acidity.

I glance behind me at the silent hours and I evoke all the people in my life … the strange, chance bodies I have possessed, in order to unknow them, and even those people whom I never knew, but who passed for an instant through my life.

Does not my most beautiful memory, and also the most secret, belong in that category?

One night, in a restaurant in Paris, a girl sat down opposite me, when I was having dessert, and asked me for the French name of the sweet I was eating. Afterwards, we chatted for a few moments. She was Russian, from Moscow, and I from a far-off country in the West that had lost all in vain adventures. We said goodbye without exchanging names. We never saw each other again.

Our lives, however, so distant, so diverse, had touched for a second,had for a moment been shared, perhaps in the fulfilment of someunknowable destiny.

Ah, when I remember those tiny moments, I feel proud, because I know how to unlock their disturbing inner meaning, veiled in shadow.

Thus, I constantly relive each embrace, each chance encounter, each person, in fact, with whom one day I happened to speak, yes, even passers–by who simply asked me for directions. I evoke them all and I feel beauty, a beauty entwined with a subtle fear that makes me tremble. For who were they, who were all those strangers who, after all, had a part, a speaking part, in my life?

My God, so much shadow! …

What catastrophes must I have fleetingly stumbled upon? Could I have spoken for minutes at a time with great criminals on their way to commit a crime that same night, or with poor wretches in the culminating hours perhaps of a wasted existence?

I even remember the faces of people I barely glimpsed from afar, but which, for some strange reason, I have never forgotten. Like the tawny-haired woman I saw on the Rialto bridge and the pale, solitary man I noticed one night in Monaco, wearing a red bow tie.

Come mirages, grow and multiply within me, come all, however small a role you played in my life, however fantastic the theory! Make me tremble, groan with fear and wonder, until I struggle up and flail my arms about to scatter you!

I could perhaps embroider whole moments around such images, moments I could thrill to.

But, no, they refuse to come to life.

Besides, I have never been able to keep a secret.

If some friend confides in me the secrets of his life, I feel so proud to know something others do not know that I immediately tell someone else. I have to put an end to the mystery entrusted to me, to prove vaingloriously that I am greater than he, because I can destroy him.

Should I feel affection for some gentle, delicate, piquant young woman, I pour all my desire into lending a little enigma to that banal, insignificant life. That is why I have sent to many a poor young girl whom I have never embraced fanciful letters, flowers, telegrams, a copy of one of my books – if I happened to be abroad.

III

March 1906

I find the future terribly moving too, because it is so utterly full of secrets.

For nights on end – disquieting, zebrine, polymorphous nights – I immerse myself in daydreaming future episodes and characters in my life, future heroes in novels as yet unplanned.

And it occurs to me that all this exists already, because it must exist. That is why I become so confused when I imagine it.

Impossible, impossible!

All I have to do is wait.

Oh, how I would love to possess today my future lovers, not engendered by fantasy, with imaginary forms and faces, but merely the idea of them, translucent, subtle … carved out of the unknown, out of nebulous possibilities, vibrant with light …

To be able one day to savour – at last! – the purple, macerated taste of the Mystery!

IV

May 1906

Movement … journeys …

Yet another voluptuous pleasure, intoxicating, enigmatic. It has always amazed me that I can be here, now, in my own mediocre country, in this city on the far west of southern Europe, and in five days (only a matter of hours) can reach the north and the capital of the sombre, dense Empire of my unquiet longings.

After wandering aimlessly for some time through other countries, I almost forget who I am, I can neither remember the atmosphere nor the landscape, let alone the people around me. I doubt that I am myself, I convince myself that I am not. I have never believed that we are complete in ourselves, the surrounding milieu is surely also part of us. Therefore our souls (and even perhaps our bodies) must vary according to the countries in which we live.

That is why I hate it when someone I admire goes away, leaving me with the fear of their return, and when I wait at the station for a friend who has been absent for some months, a great confusion grips me when I see him, I stutter and stammer, barely able to bring myself to address him as ‘tu’ as I used to do before.

I travel and travel, always randomly. That is my way of changing myself, at least in fantasy – I grow more adept in the Mystery …

And, more precisely, in a great café in a European city, I study some charming young woman of pleasure, who, sitting bored in front of her glass of wine, is doubtless waiting – in the evening – for a lover. I look at her. Almost without realising it, I find myself writing her life. I embellish and poeticise it, I dramatise it according to her face, the gleam in her eyes, the curve of her painted lips, the colour of her hair. A life, for me, always springs from someone’s profile … I can find an appropriate denouement for every type of beauty, events that could only be lived by certain eyes, certain hands, certain smiles.

The plot unfolds from there … I compose the subtle tones, her whole life … then, at last, her lover arrives, or doesn’t arrive, or perhaps he was never even expected.

But the unknown woman gets up, leaves. I follow her with my eyes until she disappears, and I feel so happy, so happy, so satisfyingly happy. I feel happier than if I were her lover, even the lover who did not arrive, because then I would know all about her and I would be unable to create a life according to those eyes, a life in accordance with those gestures.

A subtle triumph! With no hesitation on her part, without first obtaining her permission, I entered, really entered, her existence, because I included her in my inner world, gently imagining her.

These frivolous pastimes furnish me with my soul’s deepest pleasures. That is why I travel in a state of ecstasy, I lose myself in the search. There is one particular golden night which I love above all: it happened very late one night in the aristocratic quarter of some capital city. I came upon a millionaire’s gleaming car waiting outside a palace. I stopped. After a few moments, the door – adorned with a coat of arms – swung open. An extremely tall, elegant man got in and was joined by a sumptuous woman in sables and lace.

And how much greater was my victory then, alone in the wind, than that of the two people in the car, perhaps at that very moment mingling mouths, because I could imagine them, and they, alas, knew only too exactly who they were.

The great cities … the wonder of climbing up the symbolic columns in their monumental squares and, from that height, like a statue, letting one’s eyes rove over all the houses. Rapt, one’s eyes zigzag along streets, along avenues, through parks, they gaze infinitely out over the sea of rooftops. It is an anthill of buildings which, from on high, become a panorama; they intermingle, intersect, are swallowed up one by the other, dizzyingly, inextricably intertwined.

Moment by moment, the whirlpool whirls faster … We soon lose all notion of distance, a vertigo grips us … until, ahead of us, the whole horizon shifts and darkens, occupied by the mirage of another composite city.

We tremble … our sacred eyes flicker, grow feverish with flight.

And life flows by at our feet, life!

V

January 1907

In my pursuit of what is secret I have struggled to give my senses at least a different vibration, disjointed, intense and diverse, thus affording myself glimpses of a strange, disquieting illusion.

Thus, on some evenings, quite suddenly, in certain lights, I manage to feel – automatically, albeit using artifice – a painful nostalgia for a certain dead female companion, gentle and pale, a companion I never knew. That is enough to cast the propitious shadow that caresses me with doubt, fills me with colour.

On other occasions, I get a sense of things ending, of the close of a certain era in life, of the beginnings of another, with new characters, new habits. And all around me, everything is the same, existing on the same planes …

There are facts, too, that present me with blank contradictions. For example, one night in an ordinary theatre in Lisbon, a great, lacerating sadness swept over me on seeing a couple of old drunks – a hilarious double act from a famous review. When the two grotesque characters came on stage and sang their clumsy songs, swaying about in time to the harsh, jerky music, what I felt was a final bitterness, pungent, rueful, an ancient sadness, and pity too, a wrenching, pointless pity, tinged with sorrow. They reminded me painfully of the end of a life. And while the whole audience was shouting ‘encore’ and roaring with laughter, I felt like crying, for myself, mysteriously enough.

On other days, I experience sudden great joyful bursts of enthusiasm and everything around me speaks of glory. If I meet a friend, I take him by the arm and laugh and laugh, like a child. In vain do I seek the reasons for this joy, nothing has happened to provoke it. It is a Mystery, and yet somehow there is a motive for this joy, that, at least, is how I experience it, as a diffuse idea, caressing and undulant.

In just the same way I am filled at each step by motiveless feelings of tenderness and, even more bizarrely, by motiveless feelings of tender modesty.

Only a short while ago, an insidious feeling rose up in me, a tenuous caprice: I felt that I was a sweet, blonde young girl who had just given herself to her lover, and all because a friend of mine had shown me some postcards he had bought and which I had already seen in a shopwindow. They showed a pretty young girl with adorable bare breasts, the girl whom I perhaps blushingly thought I was at that very moment.

At times, I suffer from minor physical aches and pains, but I experience them only on my palate, as if they were unpleasant tastes.

Often, when I turn around in a street, in a room, I suddenly find myself in a scene in some distant, foreign city. I see it all with absolute clarity – a square, a harbour – I feel the pulsating violet penumbra beneath the majestic columns of a particular cathedral. (Here, I know, there is a possible explanation: any dislocation in the atmosphere which actually intersects parallel planes might break the vertices of light and shadow in exactly the same way as those I perhaps chanced to witness in the scene now evoked.)

Sometimes, in the depths of winter, I suddenly feel as if it were autumn or spring and there are times when, without having been ill, I feel as if I were convalescing from a long sickness, as if I had been saved from death only by a miracle.

Bizarre, picaresque, complicated ideas occur to me as I wander through my soul – creating a synthesis of its ruins – possibly the only ideas capable of expressing, by suggestion, the most intimate particularities of my inner world.

So when I am hopelessly weighed down by sadness or desolating tedium, I remember that my torment derives only from this: a hollow sheath of tin wrapped around my flesh, and something else as well, my soul I suppose. (And I fear then that my soul might be merely a green liquid – sickly, oily, turbid – contained inside that receptacle.)

I imagine the utter devastation of my life as a series of zinc lozenges, bruised and twisted, spattered with various colours, in particular, by a shade of dirty red.

And many a night, in bed, reviewing the stagnant nausea of my existence, a ridiculous longing arises in me to make of my body a triangle and to have the vertices honed into sharp steel blades. Ah, if only I could shape my body into a thread, then – I think confidently – my desolation would end.

But, I do not want to create a false impression, I feel all these things sincerely and naturally. I did not train my emotions to tremble in this confused manner. They grew disjointed of their own accord, a result of all that vain vacillation, all that useless twisting and turning.

Then, if I put something of myself in the protagonists who inhabit my works of art – idle, sumptuously detailed mirages – the eunuch-public immediately claim it is all a joke or simply incomprehensible. Incomprehensible. There is so little to comprehend in what I write, in all this. I say: ‘My life seems to me like a series of zinc lozenges.’ And that is that. Don’t look for a meaning, there’s nothing to understand. That’s all it is! I can’t even express it any other way, any more clearly, because that is the way it is – just that.

And because I know how to feel these things, a certain uncertainty filters through, which is why my extravagances are a source of pride to me; I love them with a tawny, leonine love.

(On the hillside of the olive grove in our garden, when I was little, why was there a paper saint set beneath a pane of glass embedded in the earth?)

Meanwhile, despite everything, taking everything into consideration, there is only light, insipid light, around me. In vain do I attempt to plumb the mystery, to dig shadowy tunnels.

Impossible! Impossible!

Ah, how I envy those great criminals who escape justice and who pass or, rather, disappear bloodily into murders and violations.

At least they left a little mist behind them.

Enclosed in their secret, they must live glorious lives with no regrets, gorged on marvels.

I, of course, feel only self-disgust!