Tobacco Shop
[Tabacaria]
I am nothing.
I will never be nothing.[1]
I cannot wish to be nothing.
Besides that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
Windows of my room,
Of my room of one of the millions in the world that no one knows
(and if they knew, what would they know?),
You face the mystery of a street constantly crossed by people,
A street unreachable to all thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowably certain,
With the mystery of things underneath the stones and beings,
With death putting humidity in walls and white hair on men,
With Destiny riding the wagon of everything through the road of nothing.
Today I am beaten, as if I knew the truth.
Today I am lucid, as if I were about to die,
And had no more fellowship with things
Other than a good-bye, this house and this side of the street becoming
The row of cars in a train, and a departure whistled
From within my head,
And a shiver of my nerves and a grinding of bones as it goes.
Today I am perplexed, as one who thought and found and forgot.
Today I am torn between the allegiance I owe
To the tobacco shop on the other side of the street, as real thing outside,
And to the feeling that all is dream, as real thing inside.
I failed in everything.
Since I had no ambitions, maybe everything was nothing.
The learning they gave me,
I climbed down from it through the window in the back of the house.
I went to the fields with great ambitions.
But there I found only weeds and trees,
And when there were people they were like the others.
I exit through the window, I sit on a chair. What should I think of?
What do I know of what I'll be, I who know not what I am?
To be what I think? But I think I am so many things!
And there are so many who think they are the same thing that there cannot be so many!
Genius? At this very moment
A hundred thousand brains conceive themselves in dream to be geniuses like me,
And history won't remember, who knows?, not even one,
Nor will there remain anything but manure from so many future achievements.
No, I don't believe in myself.
In all the madhouses there are crazy madmen with so many certainties!
I, who have no certainties, am I more certain or less certain?
No, not even in myself...
In how many attics and non-attics of the world
Aren't there geniuses-to-themselves dreaming right now?
How many high, noble and lucid aspirations –
Yes, truly high and noble and lucid –,
And who knows if achievable,
Will never see the light of the real sun nor find the ears of people?
The world belongs to those born to conquer it,
And not to those who dream they may conquer it, even if they are right.
I have been dreaming more than what Napoleon did.
I have pressed against my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ.
I have been secretly doing philosophies that no Kant has ever written.
But I am, and perhaps always will be, the one in the attic,
Even if I don't live in it;
I will always be the one who wasn't born for this;
I will always be just the one who had qualities;
I will always be the one who waited for someone to open the door for him by a doorless wall,
And sang the song of Infinity in a hen house,
And heard the voice of God in a sealed well.
Believe in myself? No, nor in nothing.
May Nature pour over my scorching head
Its sun, its rain, the wind that finds my hair,
And may the rest come if it comes, or if it has to come, or may it not come.
Cardiac slaves of the stars,
We conquer the entire world before getting out of bed;
But we wake up and it is opaque,
We get up and it is alien,
We leave the house and it is the whole earth,
Plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the Indefinite.
(Eat chocolates, little girl;
Eat chocolates!
Look, there is no more metaphysics in the world but chocolates.
Look, all religions teach no more than making pastry.
Eat, little dirty girl, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you eat them!
But I think and, as I remove the silver paper, which is a tin foil,
I throw it all on the ground, as I've been throwing away life.)
But at least there remains from the bitterness of what I'll never be
The quick calligraphy of these verses,
Broken gates to the Impossible.
But at least I devote to myself a tearless contempt,
Noble at least by the wide gesture in which I throw
The dirty laundry that I am, unordered, into the flow of things,
and stay at home shirtless.
(You, who comforts, who does not exist and therefore comforts,
Either Greek goddess, conceived as a living statue,
Either Roman noblewoman, impossibly aristocratic and nefarious,
Either princess of troubadours, the most kind and colorful,
Either marquise from the seventeen hundreds, busty and haughty,
Either notorious courtesan from the time of our parents,
Either modern I-don't-know-what – I can't conceive well what –,
All of this, whatever it may be, may it be, if it can inspire may it inspire!
My heart is a torn bucket.
Like those who invoke spirits invoke spirits I invoke
Myself and I find nothing.
I approach the window and I see the street with an absolute clarity.
I see the shops, I see the sidewalks, I see the cars that pass by,
I see the clothed living beings that cross each other,
I see the dogs that also exist,
And all of this weighs on me like a sentence to exile,
And all of this is foreign, like everything.)
I lived, studied, loved, and even believed,
And today there is not a single bum whom I do not envy just for not being me.
I see in each of them the rags and the wounds and the lie,
And I think: perhaps you never lived nor studied nor loved nor believed
(Because it is possible to do the reality of all this without doing any of this);
Perhaps you have existed only, like a lizard whose tail is cut off
And who is tail less than the lizard quiveringly.
I made of myself that which I did not know,
And what I could have made of myself I did not do.
The domino[2] I wore was wrong.
They soon got to know me for whom I was not, and I did not deny it, and I lost myself.
When I wanted to take off the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I took it off and saw myself in the mirror,
I'd already gotten old.
I was drunk, I no longer knew how to wear the domino I hadn't taken off.
I threw away the mask and slept in the dressing room
Like a dog tolerated by the management
For being harmless
And I will write this story to prove that I am sublime.
Musical essence of my useless verses,
If only I could meet you as a thing I had done,
And not stand always in front of the Tobacco shop in front,
Trampling with my feet the awareness of being existing,
Like a rug that a drunkard trips over
Or a mat that the gypsies stole and that was worthless.
But the owner of the tobacco shop arrived at the door and stayed by the door.
I stare at him, with the discomfort of my misturned head
And the discomfort of my misunderstanding soul.
He will die and I will die.
He will leave the store sign, and I will leave verses.
At a certain point the store sign will also die, and also the verses.
After a certain point the street where the store sign was will die,
And also the language in which the verses were written.
Then the spinning planet where all of this took place will die.
In other satellites of other systems something more or less like people
Will go on doing things like verses and living underneath things like store signs,
Always one thing in front of the other,
Always one thing as useless as the other,
Always the impossible as stupid as the real,
Always the mystery of the deep as certain as the sleep of mystery of the surface,
Always this or always something else or neither one nor the other.
But a man entered the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?),
And plausible reality suddenly falls upon me.
I half-raise myself, energetic, convinced, human,
And I will try to write these verses in which I say the opposite.
I light up a cigarette as I think of writing them
And I savor in the cigarette the liberation of all thought.
I follow the smoke as if a path of my own,
And I enjoy, in a sensorial and competent moment,
The liberation of all speculations
And the awareness that metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling very well.
Then I lie back on the chair
And go on smoking.
For as long as Destiny allows me to, I will go on smoking.
(If I married my washerwoman's daughter
Maybe I would be happy.)
I dress this, I get up from the chair. I go to the window.
The man left the Tobacco Shop (putting change in his pants' pockets?).
Oh, I know him: it's Esteves without metaphysics[3].
(The Owner of the Tobacco Shop arrived at the door.)
As if by divine instinct, Esteves turned around and saw me.
He waved me good-bye, I screamed Hey Esteves Good-bye!, and the universe
Rebuilt itself to me without ideal nor hope, and the Owner of the Tobacco Shop smiled.
– Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)
* * *
[1] We chose to preserve the repetition of "nothing", at the cost of sounding unidiomatic in English ("I will never be nothing" instead of "I will never be anything").
[2] Probably not a piece of a domino game, but the carnival costume after which the game is named.
[3] This may or may not be something, but the name "Esteves" reminds "esteve", which means "[he] was" or "[he] had been".
