Filme do Desassossego Page #4

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it's not the beauty but fatty and cellular

flesh that we embrace,:

Our kiss doesn't touch the mouth's

beauty

but the wet flesh of decaying,

membranous lips,:

And even sexual intercourse, though

admittedly a close and ardent contact,

is not a true penetration, not even

of one body into another.

What do we possess?

What do we really possess?

Our own sensations, at least?

Listen to me.

Listen to me carefully.

Absurdity, confusion, oblivion,

everything that isn't life...

In my own way I sleep,

without slumber or repose,

this vegetative life of imagining,

and the distant reflection

of the silent street lamps,

like the quiet foam of a dirty sea,

hovers behind my restless eyebrows.

I sleep and unsleep.

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.

I don't know why, but I'm troubled by

this objective network

of wide and narrow streets,

this sucession of street lamps, trees,

lighted and dark windows,

opened and closed gates,

heterogeneously nocturnal shapes

which my near-sightedness

makes even hazier,

until they become subjectively

monstrous, unintelligible and unreal.

I feel a certain duty to dream

continuously

since not being more nor wanting

to be more than a spectator of myself,

I have to put on the best show I can.

And so I fashion myself out of gold

and silks, in imaginary rooms,

on a false stage, with ancient scenery:

A dream created to invisible music

and the play of soft lights.

I will always be, under the large blue

canopy of the silent sky,

a pageboy in an unintelligible rite,

dressed in life for the occasion,

executing steps, gestures,

stances and expressions

without knowing why,

until the feast,

or my role in it, ends

and I can treat myself to tidbits

in the large tents

I've been told

are down below,

at the back of the garden.

If happiness and the new day

would never come!

If I opened my eyes from my pretended

slumber I could see,

on the darkly visible walls of my room,

floating snatches of dreams

to be dreamed,

dim lights, black lines,

hazy shapes climbing up and down.

The various pieces of furniture,

larger than in the daytime,

indistinctly blotted

the dark's absurdity.

The door was distinguishable as

something no whiter or blacker

than night, just different.

My soul's solitude grew and spread,

invading what I felt, what I wanted,

and what I was going to dream.

Clouds... Today I'm conscious

of the sky.

Clouds... Such disquiet when I feel,

such discomfort when I think,

such futility when I desire.

Clouds... I question myself

and don't know me.

Nothing I've done has been useful,

and nothing I do will be any different.

I've wasted part of my life in

confusedly interpreting nothing at all,

and the rest of it in writing these verses

in prose

for my incommunicable sensations,

which is how I make the unknown

universe mine.

I'm objectively and subjectively

sick of myself.

I'm sick of everything, and of

the everythingness of everything.

Clouds... They are everything:

Disintegrated fragments of atmosphere,

the only real things today

between the worthless earth

and the non-existent sky,

indescribable tatters of the tedium

I ascribe to them,

mist condensed into colourless threats,

dirty wads of cotton from a hospital

without walls.

Clouds...

They're like me,

a ravaged passage

between sky and earth, at the mercy of

an invisible impulse, thundering,

whitely giving joy or blackly spreading

gloom, stray fictions in the gap,

far from the earth's noise

but without the sky's peace.

Clouds...

Whoever lives like me doesn't die:

He terminates, wilts, devegetates.

The place where he was remains

without him being there,:

The street where he walked

remains without him beeing seen on it,:

The house where he lived is inhabited

by not-him.

That's all,

and we call it nothing,:

These vegetable manifestation

of both truth and life,

dust on both the outside

and the inside of the panes,

grandchildren of Destiny

and stepchildren of God,

who married Eternal Night

when she was widowed by the Chaos

that fathered us.

To depart from the rua dos Douradores

for the Impossible...

You look very good.

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.

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 psysiognomies there.

Senhor Vasques looks just like himself,

broad, cheerful face with hard features

and a steady gaze.

The two travelling salesmen look sharp.

And the local Sales representative

turned out well,

though he's half hidden

by Moreira's shoulder.

And Moreiral Moreira, my supervisor,

the epitome of monotonous constancy,

looks much more alive than II

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?

A cold silence.

The sounds from the

street seemed to be cut by a knife.

Then there was a long,

cosmically held breath,

a kind of generalized dread.

The entire universe had stopped dead.

Moments, moments, moments...

Silence blackened the darkeness.

All of a sudden, live steel...

Again, without warning,

magnetic light gushes forth, flickering.

My heart beats with a gulp.

A glass dome shatters on high

into large bits.

Senhor Vasques, his wan face

is an unnatural and befuddled green.

I watch him take his laboured breaths

with the kinship of knowing

I'll be no different.

Oh Lisbon, my home!

I remember, as clearly as what's before

my eyes,

the night when as a child I read

for the first time, in an anthology,

Vieira's famous passage

on King Solomon:

"Solomon built a palace... "

And I read all the way to the end,

trembling and confused.

Then I broke into joyful tears,

tears such as any of life's sorrows

ever make me shed.

That hieratic movement of our clear

majestic language,

that expression of

ideas in inevitable words,

like water that flows because

there's a slope,

that vocalic marvel in which the sounds

are ideal colours,

all of this instinctively seized me like

an overwhelming political emotion.

And I cried.

Remembering it today,

I still cry.

Not out of nostalgia for my childhood,

which I don't miss,

but because of nostalgia for the emotion

of that moment,

because of a heartfelt regret

that I can no longer read for the first

time that great symphonic certitude.

I have no social or political sentiments,

and yet there is a way in which

I'm highly nationalistic.

My nation is the Portuguese language.

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