from Pesoa

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles

Artwork by Genevieve Leong

Count

Fernando, Joaquin, Virgilio, and others. These people from the past, their world, and history grew inside me. They lived completely different lives that were far removed from mine. Whenever I read them, I could not help but covet what they had and did not have. There is no such thing as self: only a world of questions. How much and how many should be counted. A lot, and it is never enough. Forty, maybe in excess of forty, more than forty, I think twenty is not enough. A person is made up of dissociated identities. I did try to become a stranger to mankind. No, really, I have been untethered from myself for far too long. Only one of them is among the ones present here.   

 

First

He becomes one with the crowd. One with the drunk band members and drunk loiterers. One with the thugs and loiterers. One with the sacred few, those with tattoos. Employees. Students wearing uniforms of white polo shirts and khaki pants. Merchants in the middle of their transactions. Each with his respective patron. Each time, he reappears as a different person, indistinguishable from the guise he takes every day. Each day, he wears a pair of old jeans, a faded long-sleeved polo shirt, and rubber shoes with worn-out soles. Sometimes, he wears a T-shirt. He leaves home before eight in the morning. Walks all the way to the street closest to the North Cemetery in order to reach the less-trodden side streets. He knows all the streets, which are connected to all the other streets. He spends all day walking the streets. Walks home from a distant place. Loses himself among the people in the streets. Drenched in sweat, his shirt is encrusted with grime. Fans himself with his hat whose edges have unfurled. His sweat-slicked face is shiny. Beads of perspiration on the forehead and a patilla that reveals a strand or two of gray hair.

He keeps pointing out to me all kinds of things in all kinds of places. Later on, he resorts to listing everything that I must seek out and ascertain as real, dangles the notion of free will, and allows me to decide for myself. It is only eight in the morning, and I am already headed out of the house. I walk all the way to my destination and then walk all the way home. He teaches me how to help others. He teaches me well. Even if we are almost always together, we do not talk much. He keeps mum about things. He does not tell me what he has in mind. He does not tell me how he is feeling. He does not let slip anything about himself. 

I cannot tell for sure whether or not he is able to read and write. As I face him, I also face myself—and why I can never ever fully know what I am dealing with.

I cannot remember anything. What I can remember is that it is almost dawn. I cannot remember whether or not there are almost no people on the streets. It is only under daylight that I begin to remember why there are many meaningless words. Surely, that is possible. I stay up for consecutive nights. I go home only during the day. Then I return before it’s dark just to take my assigned place next to the night. His body remains supple. His stance, unwavering. His strands of gray hair grow in number. His cheeks, sunken. Along his hands and arms, his veins are bulging out. I cannot tell from that body which part still belongs to me. Every night, I consider giving up. That may be the final night.

When he is able to make his next step, the need to take a quick break becomes evident. In every step we make every day, our bond becomes stronger. “Mario!” Sometimes I reply: “Mario who? There’s no one named Mario here!” I will comb his hair. His nails I will trim one by one.

Twice a week, I trim his nails.

I have forgotten almost all the words out there. I am not so sure about what really happened.

A poem is what he likes the most. He cannot stop retracing his steps back to the poem. A poem is a thing.

 

Second

Funny, but whenever I look at myself in the mirror, I cannot tell which visible part of me does not belong to me. I find it difficult to have my picture taken, too. Looking at my photographs, I cannot see myself. From the surface of photographs, I lift my face. I lift it like how I would lift my old face.

One day, we were taking pictures of each other. I was the first in line to get my picture taken. Eagerly glancing now and then at the figure that was forming on the picture. I cannot remember anything.

I can no longer remember my name. As far as I can remember, I only have a few pictures.

In a room somewhere, only one window is undersized; anyone bending over to get a closer look at the outer environs can just about get their body halfway through the window. The window opens out to a wall. The window is always left open, but not to encourage gazing at the great outdoors. It is left open all throughout the day. Even at night. It is only shuttered when it is raining.

I, as well as the selves that are not me, comprise a multitude. And the self is never enough. But the me inside of me is me! Of course, I am not the only one in me. Later, I will continue to walk, to cross the labyrinth, to trespass.

I, who do not answer to my name. Every face I encounter seems to plead for an explanation—each and every time. To my surprise. I don’t think they are joking. I have my suspicions. Suspicions that I refuse to share with others. “The self is a concoction.”

There are frames meant for the pictures of the present.

translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim



Click here for poetry by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, in our Summer 2016 issue.

Read the original in Filipino

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, who has a lingering interest in found poetry and “found” meanings, created Pesoa through an erasure of Rene O. Villanueva’s book of essays, Personal: Mga Sanaysay sa Lupalop ng Gunita (Anvil Publishing, 1999). The redaction of the title is also the same as the last name of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, with one s removed.

Pesoa (Balangay Books, 2021) is a verse novel that tells, through a series of prose poems, the narrator’s encounters with his split identities, as well as his attempts to come to terms with his disappearing sense of self. Pesoa also looks into the subjective nature of memory and perception. In effect, my translation is an act to fill in the gaps in the narrative, because it is my contention that the narrator is not being intentionally evasive; his hold on reality is simply too shaky. In translation, I keep extending the lucid intervals, the moments when the unreliable narrator’s self-awareness surfaces—each time making an effort to distinguish between the narrator and his many emerging selves, a detail that is unclear in the original text.

I also address—carefully and in keeping with the spirit of the source text—the disorienting effect of the Filipino-language Pesoa’s word economy, blackout poetry’s wondrous little quirk. A loaded phrase that literally translates to “Just like the self,” for example, becomes “The self is a plain, a barren tract of flatland.” Pesoa is translated this way—with a broad stroke, its coded message presented partly decoded in English, but just enough so as not to spoil it for the reader.

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles is the author of twenty books of and about poetry, most recently Atra: Mga Tula 1999-2019 (Balangay Books, 2020) and the Poetry Book Society-recommended Three Books (Broken Sleep Books UK, 2020), with translations by Kristine Ong Muslim and illustrations by Erika M. Carreon. His works and interests encompass books, conceptual writing, translation, film, video, installation, found objects, and text-based experimentation. His erasure projects continue to explore and expand on the concepts of, among others, time and memory, language and loss, identity and anonymity, and sex and intimacy. Arguelles is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of multiple national awards—including a Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Maningning Miclat Poetry Award—and fellowships from the University of the Philippines National Writers’ Workshop and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center National Workshop on Art and Cultural Criticism. He works as a book editor and translator, and teaches literature and creative writing at De La Salle University in Manila. His forthcoming books are Hollow (Fernwood Press) and Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press).

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, including The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015). She coedited the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (Lightspeed Magazine, 2016) and Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021). She is also the translator of many bilingual editions, including Marlon Hacla’s Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020) and Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2021) and Three Books (Broken Sleep Books, 2020). She grew up and continues to live in a rural town in the southern Philippines.