Dionisia hears voices in her madness. As a child, Fernando was already inventing alter egos; as an adult, they become fully-fledged fictional “heteronyms”—the many writers under whose names his work is eventually published. Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, mentioned in this excerpt, are among them.
The play consists of seven encounters between the writer and his grandmother—some before, some after their death. Here, in Encounter Four, Fernando the prankster has disguised himself as one of his own heteronyms—the astrologer Rafael Baldaia.
FOURTH ENCOUNTER
A commercial office after closing time. FERNANDO is dressed in the exotic costume of his heteronym, the astrologer RAFAEL BALDAIA. He wears an elaborate turban and heavy makeup, like an old-fashioned actor with a whitened face and a beard. He is seated at the desk, tracing horoscopes. DIONISIA enters, in street clothes.
GRANDMOTHER: Good Lord, son! Why are you dressed up like this? You look like a witch at a fair. All you need is a crystal ball.
RAFAEL: I’m not aware of who you are, Madam. This office is closed for today. How did you get in? It must have been through the keyhole. The door has been bolted for over an hour.
GRANDMOTHER: Come Fernando, don’t fool with your grandma. Not today, when I can finally come to see you.
RAFAEL: Fernando, Fernando? Ah! Madam is the grandmother of Fernando Pessoa. You came to see your grandson, did you? What a pity. You should have come a little earlier. He works part time here, and he already left a while ago.
GRANDMOTHER: So today it’s you who wants to play theatre with me. Alright, son, I’ll do as you wish.
RAFAEL: Please don’t insist, Madam. I’m not your grandson. Do you think I look like Fernando? I believe I have a far more fetching appearance than he does. Your grandson is a good boy, but he is a bit colourless. In this profession I need a different attitude if people are to ask for my services.
GRANDMOTHER: What kind of services would those be?
RAFAEL (Offers his hand, and Dionisia does the same): Rafael Baldaia, astrologer. At your service, Madam. I study horoscopes and analyse astral maps in detail. I don’t foresee the future of the individual, I simply indicate possible paths. Astrology provides an instruction manual for a lifetime. How may I help you, Madam . . .
GRANDMOTHER: Dionisia Rosa Estrela Seabra.
RAFAEL: May I call you Dona Estrela? Such a name is surpassed only by the light that shines from your presence.
GRANDMOTHER: I appreciate your gallantry, but I can’t be a client of yours.
RAFAEL: I can imagine that. You are a sceptic. You don’t believe the stars intervene in the fate of earth-dwellers.
GRANDMOTHER: I believe it, of course. But for this to be so, Sr. Baldaia, we have to be alive, which is no longer so in my case.
RAFAEL: How interesting. You see yourself as dead to life itself. You are certainly suffering from a profound depression. It’s a pity I’m not a neurologist, but a horoscope would help you move beyond the ill-omened conjunction that afflicts you.
GRANDMOTHER: Don’t insist, Sr. Baldaia. It isn’t I who needs your help, it’s my grandson.
RAFAEL: That may be so, but Fernando has already left.
GRANDMOTHER: So there’s nothing to be done?
RAFAEL: Perhaps it would be better that you go home, Dona Estrela. Dusk is not a good time for a lady beyond a certain age to be out alone on the streets. Lisbon is a tranquil city compared with many others, but all the same one should take care.
GRANDMOTHER: I am not of any particular age, Sr. Baldaia, nor do I need to take care. I can wander everywhere, and yet be nowhere.
RAFAEL: You are like the angels, at least for those who believe they exist. But although I’m an astrologer, I have grave doubts on that score. We invent myths to comfort us in our despair.
GRANDMOTHER: I always wanted to be an apprentice angel. I would have liked that. But I’m only a chicken.
RAFAEL: But you still have wings and you wish to protect your grandson.
GRANDMOTHER: Sr. Baldaia, are you a friend of my grandson Fernando?
RAFAEL: We are like brothers, Dona Estrela, flesh of the same flesh.
GRANDMOTHER: So he’s already spoken about me, hasn’t he?
RAFAEL: Of course he has. He told me all about your meeting of twenty years ago.
GRANDMOTHER: He promised me he’d never tell anyone about it.
RAFAEL: Let me tell you, Dona Estrela, Fernando and I are very close. He can confide in me one hundred percent. It’s as if we were one and the same person.
GRANDMOTHER: If it’s like that, why doesn’t my grandson talk directly with me instead of we two having this heavyweight conversation?
RAFAEL: He’s upset with you, Dona Estrela. He often told me so. He is disappointed because you never spoke to him again after that day in the cemetery. He visited your grave many, many times and you never appeared again. You never gave him the smallest sign of your presence.
GRANDMOTHER: It wasn’t my fault, Sr. Baldaia, Believe me!
RAFAEL: I believe you, Madam. But Fernando feels wounded. He wanted to share so many things with you, things that have happened in the course of time. It was twenty years ago, Dona Estrela. Not twenty days. When he saw you arriving at the office today, he left by the back door and he said: Rafael, please speak to my grandmother Dionisia. I’m afraid of being ungracious towards her after all this time. I even thought she’d emigrated to Brazil with Ricardo Reis. I imagined her taking part in the rituals in the Baia and getting into some kind of trance with the sacred mothers. He said: now she’s come back to Lisbon, and I don’t know why. To see eye to eye with her, there can’t be anyone better than an astrologer.
GRANDMOTHER: If he’d let me explain Sr. Baldaia. I never left the country. In fact I wanted to speak with him on many occasions, but I never managed it. There was always an impassable barrier between us so I couldn’t contact him. As if on this side there were police who stopped me entering the life of my grandson.
RAFAEL: Don’t tell me the strong arm of Salazar’s dictatorship reached as far as the troubled souls in the Lisbon necropolis.
GRANDMOTHER: I don’t like to be called a troubled soul, Sr. Baldaia. I don’t like it at all.
RAFAEL: I apologise, Dona Estrela.
GRANDMOTHER: It was years before that Salazar came to plague us, and I was already unable to talk to my grandson. And quite soon Ibis went into bankruptcy, and I longed to be able to console him.
RAFAEL: I only know Ibis as an Egyptian bird.
GRANDMOTHER: Ibis was the publishing house that Fernando founded with the money I left him. It never really worked. He and I were tottering around among the silent printing presses, but he didn’t see or hear me. It was the same when they proclaimed the Republic and later with the launch of his journal Orpheu. An artistic bomb in the Portuguese quagmire. I would have revelled with him in the streets of the city. I know, Sr. Baldaia, I know. He was in a kind of euphoria with the impact of the new poetry on this myopic nation. Do you know what they called his journal? “The literature of the insane”—and I was so proud. I said to myself, look Dionisia, your madness was the inspiration for your grandson’s poetry. If you hadn’t been so crazy, he would never have been such a genius!
RAFAEL: And today you’ve been able to make yourself heard at last. By me, astrologer that I am. What message should I bring from you to your grandson? I can pass it on you know. It isn’t difficult, Dona Estrela!
GRANDMOTHER: There are so many things. I can’t remember them all. I don’t know where to begin.
RAFAEL: Take your time.
GRANDMOTHER: There’s one message which I want you to give my Fernando.
RAFAEL: I’m listening. My turban is all ears.
GRANDMOTHER: He must arrange to meet Ofelia Queiros.
RAFAEL (excited): But, Dona Estrela, their affair was over six years ago!
GRANDMOTHER: I know, and I don’t agree with that at all. It was all his fault. Ofelia has remained a spinster and is waiting for him. She still harbours a passion for him, I can assure you.
RAFAEL: You’re very well informed about what goes on in the hearts of others. But solitude may be more propitious for the development of your grandson.
GRANDMOTHER: That’s what he says in his own defence. But I’ve followed that poor girl around. She loves Fernando, and he hasn’t deserved her affection. He disregards her feelings, Sr. Baldaia. That’s not something you do to a young woman of good intentions.
RAFAEL: According to him, Ofelia’s intention was to ensnare her Hamlet in the cobweb of sacred matrimony. In a married life which is “futile, trivial and taxable.”
GRANDMOTHER: I’ve heard that before. They’re the words of Alvaro de Campos.
RAFAEL: Dona Estrela, it’s difficult to intervene between those two. Alvaro and Fernando are hand in glove. It’s a lifelong friendship.
GRANDMOTHER: Don’t change the subject. You know perfectly well what I’m saying. Alvaro de Campos is jealous of Fernando and Ofelia because Alvaro likes sex with men better than sex with women.
RAFAEL: You’re absolutely right. I know them both, and I don’t find it unlikely that Alvaro should have carnal relations with your grandson. I’m just very curious, you know. It’s part of being an astrologer. Tell me, Dona Estrela, did you ever find them in flagrante delicto in some rented room? (DIONISIA does not respond.) You can trust me. I’m bound by professional confidence. If there ever was a romance between them, Alvaro would never want to share his Fernando with that little secretary.
GRANDMOTHER: I’m not going to discuss things I don’t know for sure about the private life of my grandson. Death hasn’t turned me into a gossip. You say you’re a friend of Fernando. If you want to know what he does with his genitalia and adjacent parts, ask him yourself. What I think is that my grandson never properly concluded his relationship with Ofelia. It doesn’t matter to me whether they marry or not, whether they have children or not. But in life, to live a great love is like writing an immortal poem, we can’t just leave it unfinished.
RAFAEL: That’s so beautiful, Dona Estrela!
GRANDMOTHER: At last, Sr. Baldaia, I see you agree with me. So, will you give the message to my grandson?
RAFAEL: Of course. You can be quite sure I will.
GRANDMOTHER: I would feel a lot better if Fernando showed himself. In fact I’m not prepared to leave without seeing him.
(FERNANDO takes off his turban and cleans off his makeup.)
GRANDMOTHER: I knew it was you.
FERNANDO: But it was Rafael who was talking, not me.
GRANDMOTHER: Come Fernando, it was you who invented masks.
FERNANDO: The masks protect me. To be me is dangerous. They protect me from the danger of being myself.
GRANDMOTHER: What kind of danger is that, Fernando?
FERNANDO: A danger that’s just like yours. The danger of the abyss. I look in the mirror and I see a complete stranger. I don’t recognise the person looking at me and it scares me. I look inside myself for this being who is afraid and I don’t find anything I can get hold of. Just an infinite vacuum, an interminable falling.
GRANDMOTHER: You’re not crazy yet, son. You make poetry of your affliction.
FERNANDO: Give me your hand, Grandma! Stop me falling!
GRANDMOTHER: I can’t, son. My hand is an illusion. It has no weight. Look! (Gives him her hand.) Not even you can feel it.
FERNANDO: But I know you’re here with me and it comforts me, even though I don’t know which “me” it is.
GRANDMOTHER: Squeeze my hand like you used to, like when you were a little boy and I helped you hide from the sound of thunder.
FERNANDO: My life is like a thunderstorm that comes and goes.
GRANDMOTHER: But it will pass, Fernando, like all storms. And after that the sky will be blue again. You’ll see.
END OF THE FOURTH ENCOUNTER
