Between This Life and the Next

The last words of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa remain a subject of debate among literary historians and biographers. It is an irony that Pessoa himself would have loved to exploit, for throughout his years as a writer and journalist he exhaustively deployed alter-egos, his famous “heteronyms” that permitted the author to play upon the subject of personhood itself. As the godlike creator of between 80 and 140 imaginary selves, Pessoa had already killed half of them, in one way or another, savoring their deaths and somber obituaries and competing “final words” for years—before that fateful winter of 1935, when Pessoa (the real one) was rushed to a Lisbon hospital complaining of high fever and stomach pains.

It turned out only one of his selves would die this way, in some rickety public hospital, of pancreatitis and a diseased liver. Only one would write, with an unsteady hand, the last line of his journal: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. Pessoa knew he might be nearing the end, but then again, what if? On his deathbed, he distracted himself with various fantasies of his remaining alter egos and their infinitely interesting, unwritten fates, the selves he hadn’t killed yet and who would in theory live forever, untouched by death or disease, and forever enraged about the state of the world.

As a reader Pessoa was a connoisseur of historical quirk, the bizarre telling gesture that often emerged from the murk of the past. He spent his last day in bed reading. A footnote in Voltaire caught his eye. Voltaire mentioned in passing how the concept of happiness, in the original marketplace Greek, might best be translated as “led onward by a devil or demon-spirit.” Oh!, thought Pessoa, laughing with micro-convulsions of delight, Oh god, yes, absolutely perfect. In this unexpected thrill of creative energy his fever briefly abated, his eyesight seemed to sharpen, his thoughts cleared like a country road after a morning rain, and he felt something like a groundswell—one more heteronym left to write, perhaps, the story of a wealthy lisboeta who believes he has lived a good life but who winds up in hell. A comedy, naturally. Pessoa blinked at the open page of Voltaire. He needed something to write with. He turned to a nurse standing guard by the window. She had clearly been posted there to help the writer with his night-time inspirations. It was not, in fact, a nurse but a hat-stand. The nurse did not move, nor respond to his inquiries. He tried again, though the effort to raise his voice was painful. Madame, said Pessoa, coughing, trying to sit up, if you please, Madame. Hand me my glasses. Pessoa was still wearing his glasses; he meant to say pen. And then he died.