Without a plot or plan to follow, but as disquiet as a literary work can be, it kept growing even as its borders became ever more indefinite and its existence as a book ever less viable – like the existence of Fernando Pessoa as a citizen in this world.

By the early part of the 1920s the directionless Book seems to have drifted into the doldrums, but at the end of that decade – when little more was to be heard from Alberto Caeiro (or from his ghost, since the shepherd supposedly died of TB in 1915) and nothing at all novel from Ricardo Reis (stuck in his role as a ‘Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’) – Pessoa brought new life to the work in the person of Bernardo Soares, its ultimate fictional author. Over half of The Book of Disquiet was written in the last six years of Pessoa’s life, competing for his attention, and we may even say affection, with the irrepressible Álvaro de Campos, the poet-persona who grew old with Pessoa and held a privileged place in his inventor’s heart. Soares the assistant bookkeeper and Campos the naval engineer never met in the pen-and-paper drama of Pessoa’s heteronyms, who were frequently pitted against one another, but the two writer-characters were spiritual brothers, even if their worldly occupations were at odds. Campos wrote prose as well as poetry, and much of it reads as if it came, so to speak, from the hand of Soares. Pessoa was often unsure who was writing when he wrote, and it’s curious that the very first item among the more than 25,000 pieces that make up his archives in the National Library of Lisbon bears the heading A. de C. (?) or B. of D. (or something else).

Bernardo Soares was so close to Pessoa – closer even than Campos – that he couldn’t be considered an autonomous heteronym. ‘He’s a semi-heteronym,’ Pessoa wrote in the last year of his life, ‘because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.’ Many of Soares’s aesthetic and existential reflections would no doubt be part of Pessoa’s autobiography, had he written one, but we shouldn’t confound the creature with his creator. Soares was not a replica of Pessoa, not even in miniature, but a mutilated Pessoa, with missing parts. Soares had irony but not much of a sense of humour; Pessoa was endowed with large measures of both. Though shy and withdrawn, Pessoa wouldn’t say he felt ‘like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are taken to the window to dry but are forgotten, balled up, on the sill where they slowly leave a stain’ (Text 29). Like his semi-heteronym, Pessoa was an office worker in the Baixa, Lisbon’s old commercial district, and for a time he regularly dined at a restaurant on the Rua dos Douradores, the site of Soares’s rented room and of Vasques & Co., the firm where he worked. But whereas Soares was condemned to the drudgery of filling in ledgers with the prices and quantities of fabric sold, Pessoa had a comparatively prestigious job writing business letters in English and French, for firms that did business abroad. He came and went pretty much as he wanted, never being obliged to work set hours.

As for their respective inner lives, Soares takes his progenitor’s as a model: ‘I’ve created various personalities within… I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays’ (Text 299). Coming from Soares, this is a strange declaration. Are we supposed to believe that the assistant bookkeeper, one of the actors who played on the stage of Pessoa’s life, had his own troupe of heteronyms? If so, should we then suppose that these subheteronyms had sub-subheteronyms? The notion of an endless heteronymic lineage might have amused Pessoa, but the reason for his alter egos was to explain and express himself, and perhaps to provide a bit of reflective company. Soares, in the passage cited, is describing Pessoa’s own dramatic method of survival. And whatever he may be saying about himself, Soares is clearly speaking for Pessoa in the passage that begins ‘Only once was I truly loved’ (Text 235), written in the 1930s, not long after Pessoa broke up with Ophelia Queiroz, his one and only paramour. Surely it is Pessoa who believes, or wants to believe, that ‘Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life’ (Text 116). And isn’t it he, after all, who one day happened to look at his neighbour’s window and identified with a crumpled rag left on the sill?

Soares had no inner life of his own, and the full-fledged heteronyms hardly had more. A novelist’s characters are often based on friends or family members, but all of Pessoa’s characters were carved out of his own soul – of what he really was (in the case of Soares) or of what he wanted to be (in the case of the early, adventurous Campos) – and they each received only a piece of him. When we read Soares or Campos, we get lost in their universes and forget about their author, but they are Pessoa, or parts of Pessoa, who made himself into nothing so that he could become everything, and everyone. Pessoa was the first one to forget Pessoa.

If Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his reflections and reveries the sum total of The Book of Disquiet, to which he was after all a Johnny-come-lately. The book went through various permutations before the bookkeeper arrived with his well-wrought but emotionally direct style of prose, and even the word ‘disquiet’ changed meaning over time.

In its early days The Book of Disquiet, attributed to Pessoa himself, consisted largely of post-Symbolist texts cast in the rarefied register of ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’ but usually without the shimmery finish, and some of them weren’t finished at all. This did not necessarily make them less beautiful, but it was an understandable frustration for their author. ‘Fragments, fragments, fragments,’ Pessoa wrote to his friend Cortes-Rodrigues, because certain texts abounded in blank spaces for words or phrases or whole paragraphs to be inserted later (but they rarely were), while other ‘texts’ were no more than sketches or notations for prose pieces that never materialized. The Book of Disquiet always remained – as if this were a condition for its existence – a work that was still waiting to happen, that needed to be written in large part, rewritten in other parts, then articulated and fine-tuned, or was it time to rethink the whole project? Pessoa was never sure.

The initial idea was a book of texts with titles, for which he left various lists.