Fernando Pessoa- The book of Disquiet

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, dumbly comprehending. 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.

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