I may have lost forever my umbrella

No one will tell me who I am, nor knows who I was. I came down from the unknown mountain to the equally unknown valley and my steps in the slow evening were just tracks left in the clearings of the forest. Everyone I loved abandoned me to the shadows. No one knew the time of the last boat. In the post there was no sign of the letters no one would write. No tales were told that others might have told before. Amongst the latecomers I have a name but that, like everything else, is mere shadow. If the heart could think it would stop beating.

The monotony of my daily life will be like the memory of loves that never came my way. Ships that pass in the night and neither acknowledge nor recognize one another. I lived amongst them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected. I came from prodigious lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself. I’m like the man who sold his shadow.

To cease, to be unknown and external, the stirring of branches in remote avenues, the tenuous falling of leaves that one senses without hearing them fall. To cease, to end once and for all, but yet to survive in another form, as the page of a book, a loose lock of hair, a swaying creeper outside a half-open window, insignificant footsteps on the fine gravel on the curve of a path. To live is to be other. Time, a hesitant smile. I may have lost forever my umbrella and the dignity of my soul. I’m sure that even if I held the world in my hand, I’d exchange it all for a tram ticket back to Rua dos Douradores.

Excerpts from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. Edited by Maria José de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Translation copyright 1991 by Serpent’s Tail; edition of 2010 first published 1991 by Serpent’s Tail.