Free The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa

cousin that I met my future master. That’s all there is to tell; it was small like the seeds of all conceptions.
    I can still see, with a clarity of soul that memory’s tears don’t cloud, because this seeing isn’t external. ... I see him before me as I saw him that first time and as I will perhaps always see him: first of all those blue eyes of a child who has no fear, then the already somewhat prominent cheekbones, his pale complexion, and his strange Greek air, which was a calmness from within, not something in his outward expression or features. His almost luxuriant hair was blond, but in a dim light it looked brownish. He was medium to tall in height but with low, hunched shoulders. His visage was white, his smile was true to itself, and so too his voice, whose tone didn’t try to express anything beyond the words being said—a voice neither loud nor soft, just clear, without designs or hesitations or inhibitions. Those blue eyes couldn’t stop gazing. If our observation noticed anything strange, it was his forehead—not high, but imposingly white. I repeat: it was the whiteness of his forehead, even whiter than his pale face, that endowed him with majesty. His hands were a bit slender, but not too, and he had a wide palm. The expression of his mouth, which was the last thing one noticed, as if speaking were less than existing for this man, consisted of the kind of smile we ascribe in poetry to beautiful inanimate things, merely because they please us—flowers, sprawling fields, sunlit waters. A smile for existing, not for talking to us.
    My master, my master, who died so young! I see him again in this mere shadow that’s me, in the memory that my dead self retains....
    It was in our first conversation.... Apropos I don’t know what, he said, “There’s a fellow here named Ricardo Reis whom I’m sure you would enjoy meeting. He’s very different from you.” And then he added, “Everything is different from us, and that’s why everything exists.”
    This sentence, uttered as if it were an axiom of the earth, seduced me with a seismic shock—as always occurs when someone is deflowered—that penetrated to my soul’s foundations. But contrary to what occurs in physical seduction, the effect on me was to receive all at once, in all my sensations, a virginity I’d never had.
    My master Caeiro wasn’t a pagan; he was paganism. Ricardo Reis is a pagan, António Mora is a pagan, and I’m a pagan; Fernando Pessoa himself would be a pagan, were he not a ball of string inwardly wound around itself. But Ricardo Reis is a pagan by virtue of his character, António Mora is a pagan by virtue of his intellect, and I’m a pagan out of sheer revolt, i.e. by my temperament. For Caeiro’s paganism there was no explanation; there was consubstantiation.
    I will clarify this in the weak-kneed way that indefinable things are defined: through example. If we compare ourselves with the Greeks, one of the most striking differences we find is their aversion to the infinite, of which they had no real concept. Well, my master Caeiro had the same nonconcept. I will now recount, with what I dare say is great accuracy, the astounding conversation in which he revealed this to me.
    Elaborating on a reference made in one of the poems from
The Keeper of Sheep
, he told me how someone or other had once called him a “materialist poet.” Although I don’t think the label is right, since there is no right label to define my master Caeiro, I told him that the epithet wasn’t entirely absurd. And I explained the basic tenets of classical materialism. Caeiro listened to me with a pained expression, and then blurted out:
    “But this is just plain stupid. It’s the stuff of priests but without any religion, and therefore without any excuse.”
    I was taken aback, and I pointed out various similarities between materialism and his own doctrine, though excluding from this his poetry. Caeiro protested.
    “But what you call poetry is