He wrote in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and handbills, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts. To compound the confusion, he wrote under dozens of names, a practice – or compulsion – that began in his childhood. He called his most important personas ‘heteronyms’, endowing them with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits (see Table of Heteronyms, pp. 505–9). Some of Pessoa’s most memorable work in Portuguese was attributed to the three main poetic heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – and to the ‘semi-heteronym’ called Bernardo Soares, while his vast output of English poetry and prose was in large part credited to heteronyms Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon, and his writings in French to the lonely Jean Seul. The many other alter egos included translators, short-story writers, an English literary critic, an astrologer, a philosopher and an unhappy nobleman who committed suicide. There was even a female persona: the hunchbacked and helplessly lovesick Maria José. At the turn of the century, sixty-five years after Pessoa’s death, his vast written world had still not been completely charted by researchers, and a significant part of his writings was still waiting to be published.

‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.’ So claimed Álvaro de Campos, one of the characters invented by Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. And to spare himself the trouble of organizing and publishing the richest part of his prose, Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn’t a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man’s anguished soul.

Long before the deconstructionists began to apply their sledgehammers to the conceptual edifice that sheltered our Cartesian sense of personal identity, Pessoa had already self-deconstructed, and without any hammer. Pessoa never set out to destroy himself or anything else. He didn’t attack, like Derrida, the assumption that language has the power to mean, and he didn’t take apart history and our systems of thought, in the manner of Foucault. He just looked squarely at himself in the mirror, and saw us all:

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. (Text 396)

The problem with Cogito, ergo sum, for Pessoa, wasn’t in the philosophical principle but in the grammatical subject. ‘Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!’ cried heteronym Álvaro de Campos in ‘The Tobacco Shop’, and those myriad thoughts and potential selves suggested anything but a unified I. Much more than a literary ploy, heteronymy was how Pessoa – in the absence of a stable and centred ego – could exist. ‘We think, therefore we are’ is what, in effect, he says. And even this form of self-affirmation is chancy, for in his moments of greatest doubt and detachment, Pessoa looks within and whispers, with horror: ‘They think, therefore they are.’

Doubt and hesitation are the absurd twin energies that powered Pessoa’s inner universe and informed The Book of Disquiet, which was its piecemeal map. He explained his trouble and that of his book to a poet friend, Armando Cortes-Rodrigues, in a letter dated 19 November 1914: ‘My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on The Book of Disquiet. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.’ And in a letter written the previous month to the same friend, he spoke of a ‘deep and calm depression’ that allowed him to write only ‘little things’ and ‘broken, disconnected pieces of The Book of Disquiet’. In this respect, that of perpetual fragmentation, the author and his Book were forever faithful to their principles. If Pessoa split himself into dozens of literary characters who contradicted each other and even themselves, The Book of Disquiet likewise multiplied without ceasing, being first one book and then another, told by this voice then that voice, then another, still others, all swirling and uncertain, like the cigarette smoke through which Pessoa, sitting in a café or next to his window, watched life go by.

Pessoa’s three major poetic heteronyms – the Zennish shepherd called Alberto Caeiro, the classicist Ricardo Reis, and world traveller Álvaro de Campos – burst on to the stage of Pessoa’s life together, in 1914. The Book of Disquiet was born one year before that, with the publication of Pessoa’s first piece of creative writing, called ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’, where the ‘[h]alf awake and half asleep’ narrator, stagnating ‘in a lucid, heavily immaterial torpor, in a dream that is a shadow of dreaming’, reports on his imaginary stroll with his unreal female double:

And what a refreshing and happy horror that there was nobody there! Not even we, who walked there, were there… For we were nobody. We were nothing at all… We had no life for Death to have to kill. We were so tenuous and slight that the wind’s passing left us prostrate, and time’s passage caressed us like a breeze grazing the top of a palm.

Written under his own name, this long and languid prose text was presented in a literary magazine as an excerpt ‘from The Book of Disquiet, in preparation’. Pessoa worked on this book for the rest of his life, but the more he ‘prepared’ it, the more unfinished it became. Unfinished and unfinishable.