The Notebook. José Saramago

and mistakes, disoriented by successive pedagogical methods that are not in fact pedagogical methods, that too often are no more than passing fashions or amateur experiments doomed to fail. They are doomed by the very lack of intellectual maturity of those who formulated them, without being able to formulate or answer a question that to my mind is essential: “What kind of citizens are we trying to produce?”

      The social landscape is not a pretty sight. Strangely, our more or less worthy rulers do not seem as concerned with these matters as they should be, perhaps because they think that since these are universal problems the solution—whenever it is found—will be automatic, for everyone.

      I disagree. We live in a society that seems to have made violence a way of social interaction. The aggression that is inherent in this species of ours, and which at times we think that we have managed to control through education, burst brutally up from the depths in the past twenty years, manifesting itself right across the social sphere, prompted by modes of idleness that have stopped using simple hedonism to condition the consumer’s mentality and instead use violence: led by television, where ever more perfect fake blood gushes out every hour of the day and night, and video games that are like instruction manuals for teaching total intolerance and perfect cruelty, and, because all of this is connected, the avalanche of ads for erotic services, welcomed by all newspapers, including the more right-thinking ones, while they cram their editorial pages (if any still remain?) with hypocritical instructions to society on how it should behave. Do I exaggerate? Then explain to me how it is we have reached the point where many parents are afraid of their children—those sweet adolescents, our hope for tomorrow, from whom the word “no” from a father or mother grown tired of irrational demands instantly unleashes a fury of insults, of outrageous behavior, of aggression. Physical aggression, in case you had any doubt about my meaning. Many parents harbor their worst enemies in their own home: their children. Ruben Darío innocently wrote of “that divine treasure, youth.” He would not write so today.

       October 6: On Fernando Pessoa

      He was a man who knew languages and wrote poetry. He earned his bread and wine replacing words with words. He wrote poetry as one must write poetry, as if for the first time. To begin with he called himself Fernando, a person like anyone else. One day he remembered to announce the imminent appearance of a super-Camões, a Camões much greater than the old one, but since he was a man who was known to be discreet, who used to walk through Douradores in a light-colored gabardine, a bow tie, and featherless hat, he did not say that the super-Camões was in fact himself. After all, this super-Camões could not become a still greater Camões; he was merely waiting to become Fernando Pessoa, a phenomenon the like of which Portugal had never known. Naturally, his life was made up of days, and we know that days may be alike but each never happens more than once, which is why it is not surprising that on one of those days when Fernando passed in front of a mirror he spied in it, at a glance, another person.¹ He thought this was just another optical illusion, those ones that happen when you’re not paying attention, or that the last glass of eau de vie had not agreed with his liver and his head, but he cautiously took a step back just to make sure that—as is usually assumed—when mirrors show something they do not make mistakes. This one, however, had indeed made a mistake: there was a man looking out at him from inside the mirror, and that man was not Fernando Pessoa.

      He was a little shorter, and his face was somewhat dark-skinned and completely clean-shaven. Unconsciously Fernando brought his hand to his upper lip, then breathed deeply in childlike relief: his moustache was still there. One can expect many things from an image that appears in a mirror, but not that it will speak. And because these two, Fernando and the image that wasn’t an image of him, were not going to stay watching one another forever, Fernando Pessoa said, “My name is Ricardo Reis.” The other man smiled, nodded, and disappeared. For a moment the mirror was empty, bare, then right away another image appeared, of a thin, pale man who looked as if he were not long for this world. It seemed to Fernando that this must have been the first one; however, he made no comment, merely saying, “My name is Alberto Caeiro.” The other did not smile; he merely nodded slightly, agreeing, and left. Fernando Pessoa waited, having always been told that whenever there are two a third will always follow. The third figure took a few seconds to arrive, and he was one of those men who look as if they have more health than they know what to do with, and he had the unmistakable air of an engineer trained in England. Fernando said, “My name is Álvaro de Campos,” but this time he did not wait for the image to disappear from the mirror, but moved away from it himself, probably tired from having been so many people in such a short space of time. That night, in the small hours of the morning, Fernando Pessoa awoke wondering whether Álvaro de Campos had stayed in the mirror. He got up, and what he found there was his own face. So he said, “My name is Bernardo Soares,” and went back to bed. It was after assuming these names and a few others that Fernando thought it was time for him, too, to be ridiculous, and he wrote the most ridiculous love letters in the world. He made great progress in his work of translation and poetry, and then he died. His friends had told him he had a great future ahead of him, but he can’t have believed them—believed them so little, in fact, that he unfairly decided to die in the prime of life, aged forty-seven, if you can believe such a thing. A moment before the end he asked to be handed his glasses: “Give me my glasses,” were his last, formal words. To this day nobody has sought to learn what he wanted them for, such is the way the final wishes of the dying are ignored or despised, but it seems quite likely that what he wanted was to look in a mirror to see who was there in the end. But he was not allowed enough time. Actually, there wasn’t even a mirror in the room. Fernando Pessoa never did find out for sure who he was, but thanks to his doubts we can manage to learn a little more about who it is we are.

       October 7: The Other Side

      What might things be like when we are not looking at them? This question, which seems less absurd to me every day, is one that I asked often as a child, but only asked myself, not my parents or my teachers, because I guessed that they would smile at my naïveté (or at my stupidity, according to a more radical opinion) and would give me the only answer that would never convince me: “When we are not looking at them, things look just the same as when we are looking at them.” I always thought that things, whenever they were alone, were other things. Later, when I had reached that phase of adolescence characterized by the disdainful conceit with which it judges the childhood from which it has emerged, I thought I had found the definitive solution to the metaphysical concern that had tormented my tender years: I thought that if you were to set up a camera in such a way that it would shoot a picture automatically in a room where there were no human presences, you would be able to catch things unawares, and in this way learn their true appearance. I forgot that things are smarter than they seem and don’t allow themselves to be tricked quite so easily: they know perfectly well that inside each camera there is a human eye hidden. . . Besides, even if the equipment had cunningly been able to capture the image of the thing face-on, its other side would have remained beyond the reach of the optical, mechanical, chemical, or digital system of that photographic record. And it would have been toward that hidden side that at the last moment, ironically, the photographed thing would have turned its secret aspect, that twin sister of darkness. When we enter a room that is immersed in absolute darkness and turn on a light, the darkness disappears. So it is not strange that we should ask ourselves, “Where has it gone?” And there can only be one reply: “It didn’t go anywhere; darkness is simply the other side of light, its secret aspect.” It is a pity that nobody told me earlier, when I was a child. Today I would know all about darkness and light, about light and darkness.

       October 8: Getting Back to the Subject

      The lessons of life have taught us how little use a political democracy will be, however well-balanced it may appear in its internal structures and institutional functioning, if it is not constituted as the basis for an effective and real economic democracy and for a no less real and effective cultural democracy.