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TOBACCO
SHOP by Fernando Pessoa (writing as Álvaro de Campos)- January
1928
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I am nothing
I shall never be anything
I cannot wish to be anything.
Aside from that, I have within me
all the dreams of the world.
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Windows of my room,
The room of one of the world's millions
nobody knows about
(And if they knew about me, what would
they know?)
You open onto the mystery of a street
continually crossed by people,
A street inaccessible to any thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly
certain,
With the mystery of things beneath
the stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and
the hair of men white,
With Destiny driving the wagon of
everything down the road of nothing.
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Today I am defeated, as if I knew the
truth.
Today I am clear-minded, as if I were
about to die
And had no greater kinship with things
Than to say goodbye, this building
and this side of the street becoming
A row of train cars, departing at
the sound of a whistle
Blowing from inside my head,
And a jolt to my nerves and a creak
of bones as we go.
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Today I am bewildered,
as one who wondered and discovered and forgot.
Today I am
torn between the loyalty I owe
To the outward
reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street
And to the
inward reality of my feeling that everything is but a dream.
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I failed in
everything.
Since I had
no aims, maybe everything was indeed nothing.
What I was
taught,
I climbed out
of that, down from the
window at the back of the house.
I went to the
countryside with grand plans,
But all I found
there was grass and trees,
And when there
were people, they were just like the others.
I step back
from the window and sit in a chair. What should I think about now?
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(::::the mid part of the poem is not included in this excerpt::::::)
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I made of myself
what I did not know how,
And what I
could have made of myself I failed to do.
The domino
costume that I wore was all wrong
And I was immediately
recognized as someone I was not and I did not deny it, and was lost.
When I tried
to take off the mask,
It was stuck
to my face.
When I took
it off and looked myself in the mirror,
I had already
grown old.
I was drunk,
and I no longer knew how to put on the costume that I had not taken off.
I threw the
mask away and slept in the dressing room
Like a dog
tolerated by the management
Because it
is harmless.
And I am going
to write this story to prove that I am sublime. .
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Musical essence
of my useless verses,
If only I could
face you as something I had made
Instead of
always facing the Tobacco Shop across the street,
Treading at
my feet the consciousness of existing,
Like a rug
a drunkard stumbles on
Or a doormat
stolen by gypsies and not worth a thing.
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But the Tobacco
Shop owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him
with the discomfort of an half-turned head
Compounded
by the discomfort of an half-grasping soul.
He shall die
and I shall die.
He shall leave
his signboard and I shall leave my poems.
His sign will
also eventually die, and so will my poems.
Eventually
the street where the sign was will die,
And so will
the language in which the poems were written.
Then the whirling
planet where all of this happened will die.
On other satellites
of other systems some semblance of people
Will go on
making things like poems and living under things like signs,
Always one
thing facing the other,
Always one
thing as useless as the other,
Always the
impossible as stupid as reality,
Always the
mystery of the bottom as true as the shadow of mystery of the top.
Always this
thing or always some other, or neither one nor the other.
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But a man has
entered the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?),
And plausible
reality suddenly hits me.
I half rise
to my feet -energetic, sure of myself, human-
And I will
try to write these verses in which I say the opposite.
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I light up a
cigarette as I think about writing them,
And in that
cigarette I savor a freedom from all thoughts.
I follow the
smoke as if it were my own trail,
And enjoy,
for a sensitive and adequate moment
The liberation
from all speculation
And the awareness
that metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling well.
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Afterwards I
lean back in the chair
And keep smoking.
As long as
Destiny allows, I will keep smoking.
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(If I married
my washwoman's daughter
I might conceivably
be happy.)
Given this,
I rise and go to the window.
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The man has
come out of the Tobacco Shop (putting change into his pocket?).
Ah, I know
him: he is Esteves without methaphysics.
(The Tobacco
Shop owner has come to the door.)
As if by a
divine instinct, Esteves turned around and saw me.
He waved hello,
I shouted back "Hello there, Esteves!" and the universe
Reconstructed
itself to me, without ideals or hope, and the owner of the Tobacco Shop
smiled.
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João
Manuel Mimoso
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