My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate. I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out. But my real life couldn’t be more banal and contemptible, and my dream life couldn’t be more constant and intense. I’m like a slave who gets drunk during siesta – two degradations in one body.

Yes, I distinctly see – with the clarity of reason when it flashes in the blackness of life and isolates the objects around us that make it up – all that is shoddy, worn-out, neglected and spurious in this street called Douradores which is my entire life: this office that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees, this monthly rented room where nothing transpires but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose owner I know in the way people know each other, these young men at the door of the old tavern, this toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these same characters repeating their same old lines, like a drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scenery turned inside out…

But I also realize that to flee this would mean to overcome it or repudiate it, and I’ll never overcome it, because I don’t go beyond it in reality, and I’ll never repudiate it, because no matter what I dream, I always remain where I am.

And my dreaming! The disgrace of escaping into myself, the cowardice of reducing my life to that refuse of the soul which others experience only in their sleep, in the posture of death as they snore, in that stillness when they look like highly developed vegetables!

I can’t make one noble gesture that’s not confined to my own soul, nor have one useless desire that’s not truly, utterly useless!

Caesar aptly defined what ambition is all about when he said: ‘Better to be first in the village than the second in Rome!’ I’m nothing in the village and nothing in any Rome. The corner grocer is at least respected from the Rua da Assunção to the Rua da Vitória; he’s the Caesar of a square city block. Me superior to him? In what, if nothingness admits neither superiority nor inferiority, nor even comparison?

He is Caesar of an entire square block, and it’s only right that all the women like him.

And so I drag myself to do what I don’t want and to dream what I can’t have, my life....., as meaningless as a broken public clock.

My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream

..... which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows.