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placed in the large envelope with
Disquiet
material. Was he thinking of pillaging parts of the Baron’s ‘only manuscript’ for the benefit of Bernardo Soares? Quite possibly so, since Teive’s opus, contrary to what its ‘only’ designation suggests, was a hodgepodge of unassembled and fragmentary pieces that Pessoa had perhaps despaired of ever pulling together and cleaning up.
The Book of Disquiet
, much vaster, was that much more unorganized, but Pessoa loved it too dearly to ever dream of giving up on it.
    Besides threatening the Baron’s intellectual property, the ostensibly unassuming bookkeeper almost took over a large chunk of poetry signed by Pessoa himself. The above-mentioned inventory of Bernardo Soares’s literary output includes not only the poetic prose texts of
The Book
’s inaugural period but also ‘Slanting Rain’ (written in 1914, published in 1915), ‘Stations of the Cross’ (written in 1914–15, published in 1916) and other poems by Pessoa founded on ‘ultra-Sensationist experiences’. These poems are nearly contemporaneous with ‘Forest of Estrangement’ and drink from the same post-Symbolist waters, so Pessoa thought – for a moment – that they might as well live under the same roof, on the Rua dos Douradores, which is cited at the top of the inventory. In fact the inventory is probably both ac.v. for Soares
and
a Table of Contents for
The Book of Disquiet
. And at the bottom of the page we find this strange observation: ‘Soares is not a poet. In his poetry he falls short; it isn’t sustained like his prose. His poems are the refuse of his prose, the sawdust of his first-rate work.’
    Pessoa, in the late 1920s, felt ambivalent about the Intersectionist and ultra-Sensationist poems he had written under his own name almost fifteen years previous. Reassigning them to
The Book of Disquiet
would not only save Pessoa’s name from the momentary embarrassment he may have felt for being their author; it could also help redeem them, by providing an enhancing context. But it was a short lived idea. In a follow-up note (see Appendix III ) written on the same typewriter as the inventory, we read:
    Collect later on, in a separate book, the various poems I had mistakenly thought to include in
The Book of Disquiet
; this book of poems should have a title indicating that it contains something like refuse or marginalia – something suggestive of detachment.
    Pessoa, forever indecisive, just like his semi-heteronym, had gone back to his original plan: a book of prose, in elegant and even poetic Portuguese, but still and always prose. What had ever given him the idea of bringing poetry into it?
    The Book of Disquiet
had become one of Pessoa’s pet projects, and he desperately, if somewhat ineptly, tried to make its disparate parts cohere. The prose that had made its way into
The Book
was so heterogeneous that its new agent of cohesion, Bernardo Soares, would have to be much more than a diarist. To make Soares a believable author of such a multifaceted work, Pessoa decided to widen his literary horizons in a big way, making him even a poet. If Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, fundamentally poets, also wrote prose, why shouldn’t Bernardo Soares write verses? But no: this would have only complicated matters. Pessoa realized this and backed down, repossessing the poems he had passed on to Soares, as we can deduce from a letter, written in 1935, which cites ‘Slanting Rain’ as an ‘orthonymic’ work (attributed to Pessoa himself). Soares retained possession of the poetic prose he had inherited, however, and he legitimated that inheritance by his own practice, admirably demonstratedin the excerpt (Text 386) he wrote on 28 November 1932, an obvious sequel to ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’. And in another text (420), Soares ingeniously brings the ‘Funeral March of Ludwig II, King of Bavaria’ to the Rua dos Douradores. Fighting his incurable tendency to creative and intellectual