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POSTHUMOUS PORTRAIT IN AN OVAL FRAME

Born sun in Gemini, moon in Leo, ascendant in Scorpio, 13 June 1888, in a fashionable quarter of Lisbon, on the fourth floor of a home overlooking the Opera House of São Carlos, a home doomed to notoriety [the fourth floor will yield fewer dire results than those below it], a home with shared plumbing in the establishment of the Republican Directorate on the second floor, which, in so many words, marked another historical blow to Portuguese mankind, therefore, all mankind, Fernando Pessoa was, by account of his birth, a man stricken by his humanity, the cause of which began in utero. His mother, Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira, lost her husband, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, to tuberculosis when Pessoa, aged five, was fitted for his first pair of spectacles, not a requisite for better observing his father’s death, or the death of his brother, Jorge, two years later. As a doctor brings babies into the world, Pessoa’s vision brought the tedium of loss.

In response to the unyielding trauma of these familial departures and the subsequent engagement of his mother to Commander João Miguel Rosa, newly appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa, so began Pessoa’s ‘intimate theatre of being,’ a heteronymic feat reserved for the best and worst of us, which included over seventy different selves, the first of which, ascribed at age 6, a certain Chevalier de Pas, was an author who wrote young Pessoa letters and poems.

Fernando Pessoa was, in every arrangement, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, António Mora, Alexander Search, Rafael Baldaya, Baron of Teive, Abilio Quaresma, Torquato Fonseca Mendes da Cunha Rey, Federico Reis, Gervasio Guedes, Charles James Search, I. I. Crosse, Lucas Merrick, Navas, Jean-Méluret of Seoul, Thomas Crosse, Maria José, Efbeedee Pasha, Carlos Otto, Pantaleão, Pêro Botelho, Faustino Antunes, Claude Pasteur, Bernardo Soares (yes, me), Vicente Guedes, Charles Robert Anon, David Merrick, and Horace James Faber. Let us not forget the heteronym Fernando Pessoa, likewise the orthonym Fernando Pessoa, even the autonym Fernando Pessoa and perhaps somewhat unnaturally at this hour, Fernando Pessoa-himself.