I closed the book and went to bed, thinking about all these things, admiring Pavese, but without being in tune with him, and I soon fell asleep. On a foggy road, I saw Robert Walser in conversation with Musil. “Out of here, that is my goal,” Walser was saying. “However much you cry, you won’t manage to be as real as I am,” replied Musil. “If I weren’t real, I couldn’t cry,” replied Walser. “I hope you don’t think those tears are real,” replied Musil.
They then left, or rather — making me feel incredibly jealous — they disappeared. I came to and wondered whether other ghosts from the dream would dare to speak. “Are you asleep?” Rosa asked from the sitting room, like a ghost. I pretended to be asleep and did not reply. Shortly afterwards Cesare Pavese deceased entered my room. He had walked a great distance, he told me, he had walked down Pico’s mysterious road and carried an empty, abandoned house — the world itself? — in his hand. “The dead do not laugh,” he told me. “Laughter is linked to life,” he told me. “Death will come and will have your eyes,” I told him. He was serious and quiet for a few moments. In effect he carried an empty house in his hand and walked along Pico’s road. “What’s the use of Pentothal” he finally said to me. I got up from bed and embraced him. Then Pavese asked me if I was Robert Walser. “I am,” I answered. “I’ve been waiting for you all my death and I’ll go on waiting,” he said. He possessed the voice I had imagined for Teixeira’s character, a nasal, somewhat sensual, but vaguely stupid voice. “Anything else?” I inquired. Pavese did not speak. Pavese was still there, but did not speak. “Not words,” I said. Then I fell asleep and dreamed nothing.
Saturday
THE DESPERATE FRIEND
Such is my regret for the lack of respect with which I undertook Pavese’s entry in this dictionary yesterday that I have spent the whole day today trying to add a few more constructive lines to it. I couldn’t, I cannot, correct what I wrote about the “nasal, somewhat sensual, but vaguely stupid voice” I imagined for Teixeira’s character and discovered was the voice of Pavese deceased. I cannot correct this, because it is true that I had this impression yesterday. And, if I had this impression, I am not now going to pretend and deny it; I do not forget that I swore at the start of this dictionary to kneel before the altar of Truthfulness. Nor can I deny that I saw him walking along Pico’s road, carrying an empty, abandoned house in his hand. I really did see him like this. What can I do if I saw him like this? By way of compensation, and above all because I was unfair yesterday, I believe I am in a position today to revise my opinion about Pavese’s diary and to recall here, without further ado, that, when he died, his friends had to force themselves to approach the bulging folder containing his diary (partly typed and partly handwritten); his friends had to overcome the sense of fearful reserve triggered by those pages, that secret itinerary of a life they had always supposed to be bitter and discontented, the pages of their friend whom they generally understood to be desperate.
Italo Calvino was one of the first friends to open Tutankhamen’s tomb, by which I mean Pavese’s diary, a dangerous diary because it might infect whoever read it with despair. His friends’ initial inspection of those pages was painstaking and restrained. They knew that they would not find there the reason for Pavese’s suicide, something sought by columnists in weekly and daily newspapers at that time; they knew that the reason for such an act can never be reduced to a formula or an episode, but must be sought over a whole life, the set of constants that Pavese, though not a fatalist, called his own destiny. But his friends felt that they were going to find there all the painful tension, the secret vibrations of his soul, which even they, his friends, had not always discerned: the traces of the ill he carried inside, under the guise of his stoicism.
Calvino relates how, on opening the diary at the first page, they realized that they were confronted with an impressive document, convulsed pages, desperate cries that overflowed from them loudly from time to time. “But, most of all, we also found something else, the opposite of despair and defeat: a patient, tenacious labor of self-construction, of inner clarity, of moral betterment, which is to be reached by means of work and reflection on the ultimate reasons behind art and one’s own and others’ lives.”
Yesterday I wrote that I admired Pavese’s diary, but without being in tune with it. Today I am ashamed to have written this. Because if there’s something the pages of my diary darkly pursue, it is the creation of myself and a moral improvement, which I seek by means of work and reflection on the precarious state of my life, of the lives of others and of the life of literature, which I need so much if I am to survive and which, at this century’s beginning, is exposed to the furious assaults of the enemies of the literary as never before.
I’m going to go to the kitchen to have a yogurt; I shall be accompanied by the desperate friend who always goes with me, that friend who is myself and who, so as not to fall into the clutches of cursed despair, writes this diary, this story of a soul trying to save itself by helping the survival of literature, this story of a soul no sooner strong and steady than it succumbs to depression, in order then, laboriously, to get back on its feet, to readjust through work and intelligence, constantly battling with Pico’s moles. I wonder now why I said yesterday that I was not in tune with Pavese if he is my shadow, I, my own reader, the desperate friend who always goes with us literature-sick, who are constantly fighting against despair and defeat.
PESSOA, FERNANDO (Lisbon, 1888–1935) invented a character by the name of Bernardo Soares, to whom he delegated the mission of writing a diary. As Antonio Tabucchi writes, “Soares is a fictional character who adopts the subtle literary fiction of autobiography. In this autobiography without facts, of a nonexistent person, is the only great narrative work left to us by Pessoa: his novel.”
Pessoa gave this diary, signed by Soares, the title The Book of Disquiet. He simply called the overall project of his work — mysterious and unrealizable, as if he had sought to dissolve in the fabric of his own unending “autofiction”—The Book (of disquiet), perhaps thinking of that mythical text Mallarmé longed for all his life, Le Livre, an impossible volume, whose completion — others may try, but the same thing will happen to them — is probably only ever to be found in the project itself, a project containing the seed of the decomposition of literary genres. The Book of Disquiet, like the project it was and could only be, was discovered one day in the trunk that, for almost fifty years, had guarded it in secret: the famous trunk containing 23,000 Pessoan documents. There rested The Book, the insomniac Soares’ book. A first version appeared in 1982 and later the publishing house of my friend Manuel Herminio Monteiro — who went in search of the lost trunk and found it — published a greatly enlarged and definitive edition of the clerk Soares’ diary.
What is meant by “disquiet”? Judging by what the assistant bookkeeper Soares reveals, we are to understand by disquiet a certain unease and, above all, a certain incompetence regarding life. This incompetence is like an illness that, at one point, he himself makes explicit and defines, calling it mal-de-viver (life-sickness). Disquiet is very possibly a manifestation of this illness. In his discreet office where he works as assistant bookkeeper, Soares daily discusses death, beauty, loneliness, and identity — and the barber on the corner. Soares the clerk writes about all this far from the ballrooms of Vienna or from the luxurious mountain health spas, he writes from the grayness of the window in his office, he writes from the standpoint of the daily and ordinary, of the simple and normal. In short, Soares the clerk and his diary seem real.