INES ALMEIDA

 

On Disquiet

 

This is what I know: Pessoa’s family name means both ‘person’ and ‘persona’. Many people speculate that his disquietude was a result of his amorphous last name.

*

Octavio Paz writes, ‘Anglomaniac, myopic, courteous, elusive, dressed in black, reticent and familiar, the cosmopolitan who preaches nationalism, the solemn researcher of useless things, the humourist who never smiles and makes our blood run cold, the inventor of other poets and self-destroyer, the author of paradoxes clear as water, dizzying: to pretend is to know oneself, the mysterious one who does not cultivate the mystery of the Portuguese midday – who is Pessoa?’

*

Pessoa wrote prose in fragments. When he died he left behind 27,543 pieces of prose and poetry in an infamous steamer trunk.

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Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is an autobiography made up of factless fragments of the life of Portugal’s greatest poet. Officially The Book of Disquiet was written by Bernardo Soares, a make-believe acquaintance, a semi-heteronym, a brother, a twin.

*

I first borrowed this book from the library and then I renewed it twice. Then I tried to take it out again, but it was already taken out. Finally, I ordered the Serpent’s Tail edition online, the one with the outline of a male head, filled with the title and squiggles and swirls. Butterflies. There is a thought bubble with the author’s name: Fernando Pessoa. I own this book, but why did I want to? No one had recommended it to me because no one I know has read much Pessoa. His name just kept coming up as I looked for a definition of saudade. He embodies it. Saudade paints his writing, and his writing paints saudade, colouring in whoever reads it.

*

Pick up The Book of Disquiet, I dare you, and read the first lines of prose, “Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores. Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.” Do you feel the malaise? Are you thinking about packing your bags?

*

When I read it, I change. My voice changes, becomes heavy with melancholy and melodrama. It is a book for reading at night, alone, by myself. It needs loneliness as its stage, dreaminess and failure as a supporting cast. This is not a book for happy people.

*

I sometimes think that reading it does not help my plight. I am already miserable enough with my own baggage; I don’t need to be infected by the prose of a man who feels nostalgia for everyone he encounters: bosses, barbers, the office boy. He’s a philosopher obsessed with the monotony and meaninglessness of life. Still, I can’t put the book down. His misery is greater than mine. This relieves me in some way.

*

Fernando Pessoa lived alone, never married, and it is said he died a virgin. His true love was the city of Lisbon. A frail, thin man with a slightly curved back, Pessoa worked as a translator. He spoke and wrote in Portuguese, English, and French.

*

Does the fragmented nature of the man come from his displacement? Pessoa was born in Lisbon, but when he was five years old, his father died and his mother remarried. He moved to Durban, South Africa at seven. He returned to Lisbon at seventeen.

*

Pessoa is best known for his heteronyms, seventy-two and counting, including the author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares. He gave all of them, except Soares, physical traits, professions, biographies, personalities and horoscopes. He created relationships and discourse between some of them. He killed them off.

*

Bernardo Soares was a semi-heteronym who lasted longer than any of the others. He was a ‘mutilation’ of Pessoa’s personality.

*

Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa’s mentor, was born in Lisbon on 16 April, 1888 at 1:45pm. He is the poet that Pessoa longed to be. A shepherd who lived in the country and had no education, Caeiro wrote in free verse about Nature. He wrote thirty poems in succession in a collection of forty-nine poems called The Keeper of Sheep. According to his disciple, Ricardo Reis, “The life of Caeiro cannot be told for there is nothing to tell.” Caiero himself writes:

If, after I die, someone wants to write my biography, 
There’s nothing simpler. 
It has just two dates – the day I was born and the day I died. 
Between the two, all the days are mine. 

*

Caeiro died at twenty-six from tuberculosis. Ricardo Reis was born in Oporto on 19 September, 1887 at 4:05pm. An epicurean doctor with a classical education, Reis wrote metered odes about the vanity of life and fate. In 1919, Reis emigrated to Brazil.

*

Alvaro de Campos was born on 15 October, 1890, in Tavira in the Algarve, at 1:30pm. He studied naval engineering in Glasgow, travelled extensively and was bi-sexual. His poetry celebrates the modern age. Abrasive and opinionated, Campos would often contradict Pessoa’s opinions and would turn up in lieu of him at interviews.

*

I think Pessoa would have loved Facebook. He would have one page for every heteronym. They would post videos on each other’s walls.

*

I have never finished The Book of Disquiet, and yet it is my favourite book. I read it in the bath, in bed, in the backyard, and on the toilet. Because of its fragmented nature, I can open the book to any page and start reading. There is no linearity to the narrative. Some pieces are as short as a single line. Others are long. Some pieces are fully developed while others read like the adages of a grumpy, broken man.

*

In one fragment, he writes that Bernardo Soares was an assistant bookkeeper for a fabric warehouse, someone he used to run into when “economic necessity” forced him to eat at one of the cheap Lisbon “restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station.” But, more pressing: what did they eat?

*

I’ve read that he was more of a drinker. I can see him, with his American moustache and his slightly hunched back, stooping over a plate and picking at cold chouriço, tangy hard-rind goat’s cheese and crusty cornmeal bread. I see him drinking red wine from a bladder.

*

Pessoa hated being photographed.

Photograph of Fernando Pessoa

http://www.lpm-blog.com.br/?tag=fernando-pessoa

*

He was born on 13 June, 1888. It is the Day of Santo Antonio, Lisbon’s patron saint, known as the keeper of lost things, the defender of animals, the guardian of good marriages (!) and the protector of the souls stuck in purgatory. Pessoa was a Gemini.

*

Gemini is the third sign of the Zodiac. It is represented by a symbol of twins, based on a myth of two mortals who shared godhood in death. Geminis, ruled by the planet Mercury, are mercurial. Dual-natured, elusive, complex and contradictory, they take up new activities eagerly but lack follow-through. They are often skilled manipulators of language. They make great writers. They make greater poets.

*

On his death bed he wrote in English. “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” He died the next day on 30 November, 1935.

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The Book of Disquiet was published forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death at the age of forty-seven. He died from cirrhosis of the liver. The liver is the organ of melancholy.

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What do I know about disquiet? According to the dictionary, it is an easy uneasiness, an anxious worry, a concerning distress, an un-restful perturbation, an alarming consternation, a fearful fright and a dreadful panic.

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In escaping himself through his heteronyms, Pessoa was trying to escape his own disquiet.

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The Book of Disquiet is not just a book, it’s a cookbook. Richard Zenith, the translator of Pessoa’s (or Soare’s) best known work, sees it as “the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep shifting.”

*

Pessoa describes his own disquiet as

The desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary. You feel nothing except the mechanical rise and fall of your legs as they walk involuntarily forwards on feet conscious of the shoes they’re wearing. Perhaps you don’t even feel that much. Something tightens inside your head, blinding you and stopping up your ears. It’s like having a cold in the soul.

*

He absented himself through his heteronyms. I absent myself through food.

*

 

Pudim Flan

 

Vovo. I often find myself mesmerised by the memories of my Vovo. She’s cooking a cup of sugar on the stove top, caramelising it with a few drops of water on high heat. Each drop sending a hiss of steam up to her face. She cooks away in her polyester flower-patterned mu-mu, in her small kitchen in the apartment where she lives by herself. She listens to the radio and talks back: ack, people are so stupid she says in a thick accent, shaking her head. I’m small and sitting at her kitchen table, spooning jelly into my mouth, trying to avoid undissolved chunks of gelatine and the chunks of fruit she’s put in it.

Vovo. I see her so clearly: Big belly and bigger breasts. She is soft, wrinkled skin with eyes that disappear when she smiles. She is bright, white dentures that sleep in a cup of tepid water by the bed. She is thin fingers stacked with tacky bejewelled rings bought from the shopping channel. She is making pudim flan for Christmas. We’ll eat it together before she goes home and spends the rest of the holidays alone.

Vovo. She cracks six large eggs in a bowl and whisks in three cups of hot milk and a cup of sugar. She takes a paring knife and slices a fat vanilla bean down its middle, takes the blade and scrapes out the black seeds, like pinpoints, like beauty spots, and adds them to the mix. She cooks the custard slowly, stirring through a figure eight with her wooden spoon, the same one that finds my backside when I get lippy. She has already lined the aluminium ring with hard caramel and she pours in the custard. It splashes up and ai! her face scrunches up in pain. The flan is in a bain-marie with hot water reaching up an inch of the sides. At one hundred and twenty-five degrees, it takes an hour and a half to cook.

We wait, curled up on her worn brown velvet couch. We sink into it and into each other. I draw pictures of ladies in dresses, squirrels, and trees, and she watches soaps with her hand on my leg. The entire apartment fills up: caramel and vanilla.

 

Vanilla Cheesecake

 

Be seventeen. Lose your mother suddenly to a brain aneurysm the size and colour of a strawberry. Drive alone to the grocery store and buy a kilo of Philadelphia cream cheese and some eggs. Dig around the cupboards looking for the stand mixer and marvel at the fact that you don’t know where anything lives in this house. Find the sixteen inch cheesecake ring with the removable bottom in the oven drawer. Spray it with a fine mist of oil and line it with some baking paper. Don’t take the time to cut out a perfect circle; life is short as you’ve just discovered, so soften the paper with water and crunch it up into a ball – then uncrunch it and tuck it gently into the tin.

You need a solid foundation. Turn the dial of the oven to one hundred and fifty degrees and listen for the heat. It’s working. Take eighty grams of butter and place it in the microwave for slots of seven seconds. Why seven? Because it’s lucky. Bing! Take the melted butter. Pour it into a metal bowl with one hundred and fifty grams of honey-coloured graham cracker crumbs and forty grams of white sugar. Let the sugar fall from your fingers. Consider how many grains are present. Add some drops of vanilla, let it remind you of her perfume and let yourself think about her. Now stop.

Press this mess into the paper lined tin and bake it for ten minutes. A lot can happen in ten minutes. Smell the caramel and vanilla filling the house. Be unsure you can take this. Now, burn your hand taking the tin out of the oven. It’s a different kind of pain than the stuff you know. It’s good. Watch a red line form on the top of your hand, raw and sore. Feel your heart thumping through it and be happy to feel something because you’ve been nothing but numb for a while now. Consider burning yourself intentionally this time. Reconsider. Think about how every scar on your body has a story. Realise the person who knows all these stories is gone. Think about where that leaves you. Be blank. Be the base of an unmade cheesecake.

Take your Philadelphia cream cheese and put it in the glass bowl of the stand mixer. Let the hundred and fifty grams of white sugar pour through your fingers like sand in an hour-glass because these are the days of your lives. Think about soap operas and add more vanilla. Watch the paddle attachment slap the cream cheese into the sides of the bowl, sending up a spray of sugar into your face. Laugh for the first time in weeks. Lick your index finger and pat the spilt sugar. Bring it to your mouth and suck. Notice how every crystal dissolves into a sweet nothingness. Let it linger. Don’t worry about the cavities.

Take six eggs from the carton and crack each one into a bowl. Add each egg slowly, waiting until the previous one is mixed in before adding another. Consider that these eggs are babies. They had mothers. Feel a bit sick but very, very hungry. Feel the need to fill up the empty. Now, turn the mixer on high. Listen to the whirring because it’s good, and the whir is where you want to be. Observe the mixture fluffing and puffing, climbing the sides, reaching. Know it’s ready.

Spread the mixture into the crumb-lined pan with a spatula. Place it back in the oven for exactly forty-two minutes because your mother was forty-two when she died and this number will forever mean something to you. Turn on the oven light, lean back against the cool counter and slowly slide to the linoleum floor. Think of all the times she made this cheesecake for you. Think of all the things she did for you and then realise that she’s gone. Cross your legs. Sit watching this cake in the dim light of the kitchen. Know that no one is home and no one is coming home. Get a cramp in your leg. Change positions. Rub it out and rub it hard. Feel your muscles. Get on your knees. Pray. Know it doesn’t work, but it’s the right thing to do. Pray for her to come back. Pray to the cheesecake gods to make it perfect.

Your cheesecake is done when you shake the pan and it wiggles in the centre. This is important: don’t overcook it. Where cake meets metal, the colour is shades of caramel. It is the colour of her skin and the colour of your skin. Open the fridge. See her there. She’s in the caramel flan and the Vindaloo; she’s a jar of olives, a ripe cheese, a cheap bottle of Portuguese Rose. Throw it all out, make room for this cheesecake. Toss whole dishes wrapped in cling film. Who’s going to eat this food? Who’s going to stop you? Let your cheesecake rest overnight. It needs time to cool down, to settle. But first, take a small spoon and gouge out a chunk from the side. Hot cheesecake is gross. Gag. Grab the bottle of pink. Drink.

Go to her bedroom and look around. Feel the absence, run your hands through the racks of clothing in her closet: silk, satin, velvet. Sit on the edge of the bed and put on a necklace. Spritz some perfume. Turn on the TV. Fall asleep to the background noise. Sleep in her sheets, kick up dreams.

The next day, for breakfast, cut yourself a big, fat wedge. Marvel at the perfection. Take a bite. Chew hard and fast, don’t even taste it. Take another bite and bite your tongue.

Bite your tongue and bleed.

 

A Chocolate Sandwich

 

Your name is Salvatore Amato. You’re olive-skinned and soccer-fit. We called you Bubble-Butt.

You stole my heart with a Nutella sandwich.

We are in grade four and we sit at the same table, in the same uncomfortable wooden chairs, the ones that leave splinters in backsides, the ones with metal legs that scrape painfully against the glazed, hardwood floor during lunch in the big gymnasium on the ground floor at St Vincent’s Catholic School. I look in my school bag and my stomach tightens: my mother has forgotten to pack me lunch again. You ask me, where’s your lunch, and I say I left it on the bench at home and you offer me some of yours. I tell you I’m not hungry but my stomach lets out a tiny roar, a rumble, a low hum. My face is hot, my palms sweaty. You show me your sandwich and say it’s chocolate. I say chocolate sandwiches aren’t real. I live a life of baloney and butter, mayonnaise from a jar and wilting lettuce. No, chocolate sandwiches can’t exist. You lift up one piece of the bread and I stick my finger in, bring it back to my mouth and suck. You rip the sandwich in half and give me the bigger piece. I take it, embarrassed, starving, trying to eat slowly, failing. When my mom gets home later that night I tell her that she’s forgotten my lunch again. She doesn’t say sorry. I ask for chocolate sandwiches and she says no. I ask where’s dad, I’ll ask dad and she goes into her bedroom and closes the door.

 

Portuguese Custard Tarts

 

Dad, the last gift you gave me was a box of pasteis de natas from the famous bakery in Belem. We drove there in your van, or maybe it was a car, it was too long ago to remember. I don’t know what made you take me there. We walked around the buildings of Belem like tourists, like father and daughter. You ordered six tarts and handed me the box. I ate one in the car. Then I ate another. Then, when reaching for more, I realised I had eaten them all on the ride back home to your new house and your new family. I don’t remember eating anything else on that trip.

When I moved to Montreal later on that year, after having returned from France and from seeing you, I discovered a little Portuguese bakery on my street, Pine Street. I would go there every week and treat myself to a tart or two; the flaked pastry and burnt tops called to me in the night. I liked the way the first bite would stick to the roof of my mouth. I thought of you at every bite.

As a pastry chef at the Auberge Hatley I had to make mignardises, tiny sweets to end the meal. One day I decided to make pasteis de natas. I made the puff pastry and the custard. I lined the tarts with a round of dough and filled them with the thick vanilla curd. I baked them on high in the convection oven and managed to get the same blackened tops. I ate one and then another. I was so pleased with myself that I ran into the hot kitchen yelling about my triumph. The sous-chef bit into one and said: They are just custard tarts. They’re nothing special. These are everywhere in France.

I made them in my chocolate shop, but I could never get the tops to caramelise the way they do in Portugal and Montreal. I tried extra sugar and grilling. I took the crème brulee torch to them. A master faker. They sold fast and people loved them but I saw them for the counterfeits they were.

There is a place that sells them in Wellington, for four dollars and fifty cents. The pastry is not crisp and the tops are pale. I buy one and feed a bite to my daughter, hoping she’ll love it more than she loves cupcakes, but she spits it out on her plate.

Dad, I wonder who you think of when you eat Portuguese custard tarts, alone in your flat in Dover. Do the memories of the people you left behind fill your home up like smoke? Do they stick to the roof of your mouth?

 

Everything Salad: A Beginning

 

I had just spent the last few months eating packaged foods, Rice-A-Roni, reconstituted potato from flakes, and take-out. He invited me over for dinner and made me a salad. I had recently buried my mother, and he made me a salad.

He started by washing the romaine in the sink. He took each leaf separately and rinsed it under the cold water, and dried them, again, leaf by leaf, with a tea towel. I sat in the living room, drinking wine and listening to the crunch of living leaf under knife blade. We talked as he chopped: white button mushrooms, thick green olives, red pepper, green pepper. He cubed Provolone and shaved Asiago as we smiled at each other, through the door way of the kitchen, the light spilling out into the candle-lit living room, where we’d eat our first meal together.

He whisked olive oil and balsamic until they became an emulsion, and poured it on the salad in large metal bowl. He brought it to me with two forks, and we sat there on his couch, stabbing at the salad together, taking turns, being polite. I didn’t want to eat too much. I didn’t want to show him how hungry I was.

 

Doughnuts

 

We are tucked under heavy blankets, the odd goose-down feather sticks out tickling a ticklish nose. We all breathe differently. The boy with asthma is a little wheezy. His chest rises, and I hear a struggle. The girl sighs as she exhales, not all the time, but enough to notice. Under these blankets we are a tangle of legs and arms. Some are softer than others. Some legs are furry, others prickly. Small toes with sharp nails that catch soft skin result in wails, whines, whimpers. I run my hand through my daughter’s hair and with a firm voice she tells me to stop because she’s sleeping. I trace the soft features of my son’s face, his eyebrows (mine), his nose (his own). He nuzzles into my neck and says will you make us doughnuts today? We were good last night. A man-size arm drapes over the three of us. As they drift back to sleep, I pull away, slinking out the side of the bed, and walk upstairs to the kitchen, leg-stiff and back-sore, ankles cracking, wondering if we have enough eggs.

Four hundred grams of flour mixes with a teaspoon of baking powder in my metal bowl. I add sixty grams of white sugar while a cup of milk warms itself on the element of my stove top with half a vanilla bean bobbing on the ripples. I put seven grams of dried yeast in the milk and whisk. Once the mixer starts, the kids wake up for real. I hear a tumble of feet up the stairs and bodies flying at couches. It’s time for cartoons. I’ve cracked two eggs into the milk, removed the husk of vanilla bean and poured it into the bowl. As my mixer thrashes about the counter, I make coffee. I watch the chaffinches outside the window and lose myself in the music of the mixer pounding away on the metal bench, kneading. Butter. One hundred grams and then we rest, me and my dough, for an hour. It stays in the bowl covered with a checked tea towel. I sit with the kids, one on my lap, the other one next to me. I rise to find my dough risen too, so I scoop it out of the bowl and place it on the wooden bench where I knead it with my hands a little, to work the gluten. I punch holes in the tender dough with the doughnut cutter from Japan City. I leave them to rise again on the metal trays. The deep fryer is plugged in, the scent of hot oil and yeast fills the kitchen.

I lift each ball carefully (they are so delicate) and submerge them in the oil one by one with my fingers. Flicked mid-way through cooking time to cook both sides evenly, they come out like little golden pillows. The best part is the cinnamon sugar that then trails its way through the house, onto couches and beds, sticking to fingers and hair. The crystals dissolve into sickly-sweet on our tongues as we eat the doughnuts with hot coffee and hot chocolate, steaming in mugs. I go back to the window in the kitchen but the birds are gone. The kids giggle in the living room and I think back and remember the cold, hard cereal of my childhood, the lonely breakfasts spent in front of the TV and even though I shouldn’t, I eat another one. And then a few more, until I feel so sick that I think about throwing it all up, two fingers down the back of the throat, a stomach contraction and a heave.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ines Almeida is a former chef turned writer. She recently completed an MA in non-fiction at the IIML. For her thesis she wrote a series of essays on family, food, longing and that bittersweet Portuguese word Saudade.

 

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