Free The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa Page B

surrendering to the sky its rightful paths.
    It was an occasion to be happy. But something weighed on me, some inscrutable yearning, an indefinable and perhaps even noble desire. Perhaps it was just taking me a long time to feel alive. And when I leaned out my high window, looking down at the street I couldn’t see,I suddenly felt like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are taken to the window to dry but are forgotten, balled up, on the sill where they slowly leave a stain.

30
    Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart. An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul. My master Vieira*.....
    But sometimes I’m different. Sometimes I have the warm tears of those who don’t have and never had a mother; and the eyes that burn with these dead tears burn inside my heart.
    I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don’t remember. I’m artificial. It was always against strange breasts that I woke up, cuddled as if by proxy.
    Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! Who would I be now if I’d received the affection that comes from the womb and is placed, through kisses, on a baby’s face?
    Perhaps my regret for having never been a son plays a large role in my emotional indifference. Whoever held me as a child against her face couldn’t hold me against her heart. Only she who was far away, in a tomb, could have done that – she who would have belonged to me, had Fate willed it.
    They told me later on that my mother was pretty, and they say that, when they told me, I made no comment. I was already fit in body and soul, but ignorant about emotions, and people’s speech was not yet news from other, hard-to-imagine pages.
    My father, who lived far away, killed himself when I was three, and so I never met him. I still don’t know why he lived far away. I never cared to find out. I remember his death as a grave silence during the first meals we ate after learning about it. I remember that the others would occasionally look at me. And I would look back, dumblycomprehending. Then I’d eat with more concentration, since they might, when I wasn’t looking, still be looking at me.
    I’m all of these things, like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility.

31
    The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t feel.
    Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, consisting of nocturnal negations. Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching – with the awareness of my body – a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things. Sometimes my soul starts fading, and then the random details of daily life float on the surface of consciousness, and I find myself entering amounts while floundering in sleeplessness. At other times I wake up from the half-sleep I’d fallen into, and hazy images with poetical and unpredictable colours play out their silent show to my inattention. My eyes aren’t completely closed. My faint vision is fringed by a light from far away; it’s from the street lamps that border the deserted street down below.
    To cease, to sleep, to replace this intermittent consciousness with better, melancholy things, whispered in secret to someone who doesn’t know me!… To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea, fluidly skirting real shores, on a night in which one really sleeps!… To cease, to be