The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa Read Free Book Online Page A

it flow farther away, or nearer? ... Is there any reason for anything being what it is? Is there any reason that’s true and real like my hands? ...
     
SECOND WATCHER Our hands are not true or real. They’re mysteries that inhabit our life ... Sometimes, staring at my hands, I fear God ... No wind makes the candles flutter, but look: they flutter. Toward what? ... What a pity if someone could answer! ... I feel like listening to exotic melodies which at this very moment are surely playing in palaces on other continents ... In my heart everything is always far away ... Perhaps because I chased the waves at the seashore when I was a child. I led life by the hand among the rocks at low tide, when the ocean seems to have crossed its hands on its chest and fallen asleep, like the statue of an angel, so that no one will ever look at it again ...
     
THIRD WATCHER Your words remind me of my soul ...
     
SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they’re not true ... I hardly realize. Im saying them. I repeat what a voice I don’t hear tells me ... But I must have really lived by the seashore ... I love things that wave this way or that. There are waves in my soul. I seem to rock when I walk ... I feel like walking right now. I don’t do it, because nothing’s worth doing, especially when it’s something we feel like doing ... The hills are what I fear... They can’t possibly be so large and still. They must have a stony secret they refuse to tell ... If I could lean out that window without seeing hills, then someone in whom I feel happy would, for a moment, lean out of my soul ...
     
FIRST WATCHER I myself love the hills ... On this side of all hills life is always ugly ... On the other side, where my mother lives, we used to sit in the shade of tamarind trees and talk about going to other lands . .. There everything was long and happy like the song of two birds, one on either side of the path ... Our thoughts were the only clearings in the forest. And our dreams were that the trees would cast some other calm besides their shadows on the ground ... Surely that was how we lived—I and I don’t know if anyone else ... Tell me this was true so that I won’t have to cry ...
     
SECOND WATCHER I lived among rocks in plain view of the sea ... The hem of my skirt whipped cool and salty against my bare legs... I was small and wild ... Today I’m afraid of having been ... I seem to sleep through the present... Speak to me of fairies. I’ve never heard anyone speak of them . .. The ocean was too big to ever make me think of them ... It’s cozier in life to be small... Were you happy, sister?
     
FIRST WATCHER I’m beginning, in this moment, to have been so ... Then too, it all happened in the shade ... The trees lived it more than I did ... It never arrived, and I hardly expected it to ... And you, sister, why don’t you speak?
     
THIRD WATCHER It horrifies me that I’ll soon have said what I’m going to say. My words, spoken in the present, will belong immediately to the past, they’ll be somewhere outside me, irrevocable and fatal ... When speaking, I think about what’s going on in my throat, and my words seem like people ... My fear is larger than me. I can feel in my hand, I don’t know how, the key to an unknown door. And I’msuddenly, all of me, a talisman or tabernacle conscious of itself. That’s why it so scares me, like a dark forest, to pass through the mystery of speaking ... But who knows if this is really how I am and what I feel? ...
     
FIRST WATCHER It’s so hard to know what we feel when we look at ourselves! Even living seems hard when we stop to think about it ... Speak, therefore, without thinking about the fact you exist. Weren’t you going to tell us who you once were?
     
THIRD WATCHER What I once was no longer remembers who I am. Poor happy girl that I used to be! ... I lived among the shadows of branches, and everything in my soul is trembling leaves. When I walk in the sun, my shadow is cool. I