when he talks to me, except on his grumpy days, when he’s fretting about something and isn’t polite to anyone. But why does he occupy my thoughts? Is he a symbol? A cause? What is he?
Vasques – the boss. I already remember him in the future with the nostalgia I know I’m bound to feel. I’ll be peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won’t write the works I don’t write now, and to keep on not writing them I’ll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. Or I’ll be in an institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the anonymous throng of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing. Wherever I may be, I’ll miss Senhor Vasques and the office on the Rua dos Douradores, and the monotony of my daily lifewill be like the remembrance of the loves that never came my way and the triumphs that weren’t to be mine.
Vasques – the boss. I see him today from that future as I see him today from right here: medium height, stocky, a bit coarse but affectionate, frank and savvy, brusque and affable, a boss not only in his handling of money but also in his unhurried hands, in their thick hair and veins that look like small coloured muscles, in his full but not fat neck, and in his ruddy and taut cheeks with their dark, always close-shaven whiskers. I see him, I see his energetically deliberate gestures, his eyes thinking within about things outside. It displeases me when I’ve somehow displeased him, and my soul rejoices when he smiles, with his broad and human smile, like an applauding crowd.
Perhaps the lack of some more distinguished figure in my immediate world explains why Senor Vasques, a common and even brutish man, sometimes gets so enmeshed in my thoughts that I forget myself. I believe there’s a symbol here. I believe or almost believe that somewhere, in a remote life, this man was something much more important to me than he is today.
9
Ah, I understand! Vasques my boss is Life – monotonous and necessary, imperious and inscrutable Life. This banal man represents the banality of Life. For me he is everything, externally speaking, because for me Life is whatever is external.
And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, the fourth-floor room* where I live, on this same Rua dos Douradores, represents Art for me. Yes, Art, residing on the very same street as Life, but in a different place. Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place. Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered.
10
Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent and consuming impulses – both good and bad, noble and vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to
Vasques – the boss. I already remember him in the future with the nostalgia I know I’m bound to feel. I’ll be peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won’t write the works I don’t write now, and to keep on not writing them I’ll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. Or I’ll be in an institution for paupers, happy in my utter defeat, mixed up with the rabble of would-be geniuses who were no more than beggars with dreams, thrown in with the anonymous throng of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing. Wherever I may be, I’ll miss Senhor Vasques and the office on the Rua dos Douradores, and the monotony of my daily lifewill be like the remembrance of the loves that never came my way and the triumphs that weren’t to be mine.
Vasques – the boss. I see him today from that future as I see him today from right here: medium height, stocky, a bit coarse but affectionate, frank and savvy, brusque and affable, a boss not only in his handling of money but also in his unhurried hands, in their thick hair and veins that look like small coloured muscles, in his full but not fat neck, and in his ruddy and taut cheeks with their dark, always close-shaven whiskers. I see him, I see his energetically deliberate gestures, his eyes thinking within about things outside. It displeases me when I’ve somehow displeased him, and my soul rejoices when he smiles, with his broad and human smile, like an applauding crowd.
Perhaps the lack of some more distinguished figure in my immediate world explains why Senor Vasques, a common and even brutish man, sometimes gets so enmeshed in my thoughts that I forget myself. I believe there’s a symbol here. I believe or almost believe that somewhere, in a remote life, this man was something much more important to me than he is today.
9
Ah, I understand! Vasques my boss is Life – monotonous and necessary, imperious and inscrutable Life. This banal man represents the banality of Life. For me he is everything, externally speaking, because for me Life is whatever is external.
And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, the fourth-floor room* where I live, on this same Rua dos Douradores, represents Art for me. Yes, Art, residing on the very same street as Life, but in a different place. Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place. Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered.
10
Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent and consuming impulses – both good and bad, noble and vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to
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