It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order.

No other work of Pessoa interacted so intensely with the rest of his universe. If Bernardo Soares says that his heart ‘drains out… like a broken bucket’ (Text 154) or that his mental life is ‘a bucket that got knocked over’ (Text 442), Álvaro de Campos declares ‘My heart is a poured-out bucket’ (in ‘The Tobacco Shop’) and compares his thinking to ‘an overturned bucket’ (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that ‘Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others’ (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that ‘The same love by which we’re loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.’ And when the assistant bookkeeper longs to ‘notice everything for the first time… as direct manifestations of Reality’, we can’t help but think of Alberto Caeiro, whose verses are a continual hymn to the direct, unmediated vision of things.

We can leaf through The Book of Disquiet as through a lifelong sketchbook revealing the artist in all his heteronymic variety. Or we may read it as a travel journal, a ‘book of random impressions’ (Text 442), Pessoa’s faithful companion throughout his literary odyssey that never left Lisbon. Or we may see it as the ‘factless autobiography’ (Text 12) of a man who dedicated his life to not living, who cultivated ‘hatred of action like a greenhouse flower’ (Text 103).

The Book of Disquiet, which took different forms, also knew different authors. As long as The Book was just one book, consisting of post-Symbolist texts with titles, the announced author was Fernando Pessoa, but when it mutated to accommodate diaristic passages, inevitably more intimate and revealing, Pessoa followed his usual custom of hiding behind other names, the first of which was Vicente Guedes. In fact Guedes was initially responsible only for the diary (or diaries) that pushed its (or their) way into The Book of Disquiet. The ‘autobiography of a man who never existed’ is how Pessoa, in a passage intended for a Preface, described Guedes’s ‘gentle book’, which is referred to in another passage as the Diary, as if this were its actual title. Pessoa, in his publication plans, began to cite Vicente Guedes as the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet, which suggests that it and the ‘gentle’ Diary were one and the same book. On the other hand, the archives contain a fragmentary passage from a ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’, dated 22 August 1914, which pokes fun at a second-rate Portuguese writer and surely does not belong in Disquiet. Diaries usually have dates, but almost no dated material entered The Book of Disquiet until 1929, when Vicente Guedes had already been given his walking papers. Whatever intentions Pessoa may have one day had, the early Book of Disquiet never boiled down to a diary, though it did encompassa ‘Random Diary’ and a ‘Lucid Diary’ – or single entries from projected diaries with these names – as well as the a forecited ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, all of which date (according to manuscript and stylistic evidence) from 1915 to 1920, when Guedes was active.

Vicente Guedes was one of Pessoa’s busiest and most versatile collaborators in the 1910 s. Besides his diary writings, Guedes translated, or was supposed to translate, plays and poems by the likes of Aeschylus, Shelley and Byron, as well as ‘A Very Original Dinner’, a mystery story penned by Alexander Search, the most prolific of the English-language heteronyms. Though he shirked his duties as a translator, Guedes ‘really’ wrote a few poems, a number of short stories and several mystical tales. In one of these tales, ‘The Ascetic’, the title character tells his interlocutor that paradises and nirvanas are ‘illusions inside other illusions. If you dream you’re dreaming, is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you’re dreaming?’ This sort of musing is vaguely reminiscent of Disquiet in its formative phase, which may be why Pessoa decided to entrust it to Guedes, whose wide-ranging literary talents made him a potentially excellent author-administrator of such a capacious work.

The manuscript identifying Vicente Guedes as the author of a Diary that was supposed to be part (or perhaps all) of the early Book of Disquiet also includes a passage titled ‘Games of Solitaire’ (Text 351), which evokes the evenings that the narrator spent as a child with his elderly aunts in a country house. The passage is preceded by this notation:

B. of D.

A section entitled: Games of Solitaire (include In the Forest of Estrangement?)

In its language and tone, ‘Forest of Estrangement’ has absolutely nothing in common with the passage about old aunts playing solitaire while their sleepy maid brews tea. Perhaps this was conceived as a mere port of entry to the section that would have the same name and whose ‘games of solitaire’ would be exercises in daydreamy prose such as ‘Estrangement’, written by Pessoa for the same reason we play cards: to pass the time. Whatever the case, The Book was in trouble. Pessoa didn’t know what to do with the early texts that wafted in the misty atmosphere of the strange forest, and perhaps he considered excluding them altogether. What place could they have in a diary? Or even next to a diary?

More than ten years later, Bernardo Soares would reformulate the games of solitaire (Text 12):

I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations… My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don’t interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don’t probe them, because in solitaire the cards don’t have any special significance.

In the same passage, Soares compares his mental and literary activity to another domestic pastime, crochet, as Álvaro de Campos also does in a poem dated 9 August 1934:

I also have my crochet.
It dates from when I began to think.
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole…
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing.
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.

What’s highly significant about the assistant bookkeeper’s crochet is that ‘between one and another plunge’ of the hooked needle, ‘all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks’. This observation would seem odd or just plain weird, were it not for the royal dreams and reveries that filled up many pages of Disquiet in its early days. In Soares, as we shall see, Pessoa managed to conciliate (though never to his full satisfaction) the sumptuous, imperial dreams of The Book’s first phase with the concerns of a modest, twentieth-century office clerk. Vicente Guedes, who was also an assistant bookkeeper, seems to have been groomed for the same conciliatory role, but in spite of his several mystical tales, Guedes was too coldly rational in his diary entries to be believable as a writer of wispy post-Symbolist texts, and Pessoa never directly named him as their author. But Guedes held the title of general author of The Book of Disquiet for at least five years and perhaps as long as ten, for whatever it’s worth, since the manuscript evidence suggests that most of the 1920s was (as indicated earlier) a fallow period for The Book.

It was probably in 1928 that Pessoa, now wearing the mask of Bernardo Soares, returned to The Book of Disquiet, which became a resolutely confirmed diary, as acutely personal as it was objective – as if the world around and inside the diarist were all the same film that he stared at intently, sometimes listened to, but never touched.