The hidden meaning of life… “But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning.” Abel knew Pessoa’s poetry well. He had made of his poems another Bible. He may not have understood them completely and perhaps saw in them things that weren’t there, but while he suspected that Pessoa was often mocking his readers and that, while appearing to be sincere, he was, in fact, making fun of them, Abel had grown used to respecting him despite all his contradictions. And while he had no doubts about Pessoa’s greatness as a poet, it sometimes seemed to him, especially when he was in his absurd, disenchanted mood, that there was much that was gratuitous in his poetry. “So what?” thought Abel. “Why shouldn’t poetry be gratuitous? It can be, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what is the point of gratuitous poetry? Perhaps poetry is like a spring or a mountain stream, which has no point, no reason to exist. Men get thirsty, and that’s what gives meaning to the water. Is it the same with poetry? No poet, and no man, whoever he may be, is simple and natural. Pessoa certainly wasn’t. No one feeling a thirst for humanity would try to slake that thirst on Fernando Pessoa’s verses: it would be like drinking salt water. And yet what wonderful, fascinating poetry! Gratuitous, yes, but what does that matter if, when I plumb my own depths, I find that I, too, am gratuitous and futile? And that’s what Silvestre can’t stand: the useless life. We should be fully engaged with life, each individual should reach out beyond himself. Being merely present isn’t enough. Being a mere witness is tantamount to being dead. That’s what he meant to say. It doesn’t matter if you stay in one spot, but your life should reach out if it is not to be a mere animal existence, as unconscious as the water flowing from a spring. But how to reach out? And where to? How and where: there’s a problem that throws up a thousand other problems. It’s not enough to say that one’s life should reach out, because there are a thousand answers as to the ‘how’ and the ‘where.’ Silvestre’s is one answer, someone who has a religious belief is another. How many more are there? And, of course, the same answer may be right for various people, just as another may be right for only one person and no one else. Anyway, I got lost along the way. Everything would be all right if I didn’t sense that there were many other roads to follow, and if I wasn’t so busy removing obstacles from my chosen path. The life I’ve chosen is a hard and difficult one. I’ve learned a lot from it. It’s in my power to abandon it and start another. So why don’t I? Because I like this life? Partly. I find it interesting to choose to lead a life that others would accept only if it was forced on them. But it’s not enough, this life isn’t enough. What to choose, then? Being ‘married, futile and taxable’? Is it possible to be one of those things and not the others? And then what?”
Abel felt confused. Silvestre had accused him of being useless, and that had bothered him. No one likes his weaknesses to be exposed, and his awareness of his own uselessness was Abel’s Achilles’ heel. His mind was always asking him that awkward question: “Why?” He would avoid it, and then pretend he wasn’t by thinking about something else or engaging in vain speculations, but the question wouldn’t go away: it stood there stiff, ironic, implacable, waiting for him to return from his meanderings. What he found particularly distressing was that he never saw the same perplexity in other people, some indication that they felt as troubled as he did. Other people’s troubles (or so Abel thought) arose from personal misfortune, a lack of money, a case of unrequited love, but not from life itself. Once, this certainty had given him a consoling sense of superiority. Now he found it merely irritating. Such confidence, such sangfroid in the face of those secondary problems, prompted in him a mixture of scorn and envy.
In telling him about his past, Silvestre had only added to his feeling of unease. And yet, for all that, Abel had to say that Silvestre’s life had been just as useless as his, since none of the things he had strived for had been achieved. Silvestre was old, doing today what he had always done — mending shoes — but Silvestre himself had said that at least his life had taught him to see beyond the soles of the shoes he was mending, while all life had given Abel was the ability to sense the existence of something hidden, of something capable of giving real meaning to his life. It would be better not to have that ability. He would be able to live peacefully, the peace that comes from dulling one’s mind, which was what most people did. “‘Most people,’” he thought, “what a stupid expression! What do I know about ‘most people’? I might come across thousands of people in the course of a day, but I only truly see a few dozen. I see them looking serious, happy, slow, harassed, ugly or beautiful, plain or attractive, and I call them ‘most people.’ I wonder what they think of me. I, too, walk slowly or quickly, am serious or happy. Some will think me ugly, others handsome or plain or attractive. After all, I am ‘most people’ too. Some would also consider my mind dull. We all receive the daily dose of morphine that dulls our thoughts. Habits, vices, repeated words and hackneyed gestures, boring friends and enemies we don’t even really hate, these are all things that dull our minds. A full life! Who can genuinely claim to live a full life? We all wear around our neck the yoke of monotony, we all have hopes, though heaven knows what for! Yes, we all have hopes! Some more obscure than others, but we all have expectations. ‘Most people’! Said in that disdainful, superior tone, it’s simply idiotic. The morphine of habit, the morphine of monotony. Ah, Silvestre, my good, pure Silvestre, you have no idea what massive doses of morphine you have swallowed! You and your plump wife Mariana, so kind she makes you want to weep!” (As he was thinking these thoughts, Abel was almost weeping himself.) “These thoughts don’t even have the merit of being very original. They’re like a secondhand suit in a shop full of new clothes, a piece of merchandise left behind after the market, the nausea brought on by indigestion.”
Whenever he reached this point, Abel would leave the house. If he was in time and if he had enough money, he would go to the cinema. He found the plots of the films absurd. Men pursuing women, women pursuing men, mental aberrations, cruelties, and stupidity from first frame to last. Stories repeated a thousand times over: a man, a woman and her lover; a woman, a man and his lover; and even worse was the simplistic way they dealt with the battle between good and evil, between purity and depravity, between the mud and the stars. Morphine. A legal drug advertised in all the papers. A way of passing the time, as if we were all going to live forever.