A few good things came out posthumously, but Pessoa hit his highest notes as the man behind the curtain. What’s notable about the heteronyms, besides their number, is that each one writes so differently from the others. The person I am today is like the damp in the hall at the back of the house I might prefer Caeiro’s austere lucidity while you are knocked flat by Campos’s devastating self-assessments, evident in his manic hymns to the big city or the aching, elegiac “Birthday”:īack when they used to celebrate my birthday Liking Alberto Caeiro by no means guarantees liking Álvaro de Campos, and this too makes it hard to speak of Pessoa in unitary terms. What I am today is their having sold the house, What I am today (and the house of those who loved me trembles through my tears). It’s I having survived myself like a spent match. Or perhaps you’re partial to the high school Latin teacher Ricardo Reis and his classical odes, and baffled by my enthusiasm for The Book of Disquiet, an autobiography of someone who never existed that was begun in 1914 by Vicente Guedes but finished by Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who took up the project after Guedes disappeared in the 1920s. Perhaps you pore over a single lovelorn document by the kyphotic teenager Maria José, dying from tuberculosis in a Lisbon apartment, while I chuckle at the satires of Sidney Parkinson Stool and Dr. Gaudêncio Nabos, both of whom belonged to a literary society founded by their friend F.A.N. Pessoa, the organizer of many phantom cricket matches at the nonexistent Cato Lodge Cricket Club in Durban, South Africa.
Remarkably, no one seems to think Pessoa was in anything but his right mind.
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