In the style of Jorge Luis Borges

I never met Aurélio Pessoa, a minor clerk of the Lisbon customs house who died, ailing and all but forgotten, in the comatose heat of an August afternoon in 1934. What he left behind is a single trunk, and what the trunk contains is not a life but a multitude. The Portuguese word that was also his surname means, conveniently, "person"; and a pessoa, the grammarians and the poets agree, is a mask through which a voice not quite one's own is permitted to speak.

We pass our days on a comfortable supposal: that one person answers to one name, that the self is a coin with a single face. Pessoa held, with an obdurate and unteachable conviction, that this was a fiction of convenience. He could not be fazed by the charge of being many men at once; nothing, his few friends recalled, disturbed his composure less than the accusation of inconsistency. By the count in his own ledger he possessed seventy-two selves, and to each he had given a name, a handwriting, a history, and a separate orthography — one spelling in the old fashion, with its mute letters intact, another in the clipped reforms of the new century.

Each of these had its own mien, its particular bearing and cast of countenance, as distinct as the faces of strangers in a queue. One was a helmsman who had steered grain-ships down the Tagus and could name every shoal by feel. One was a numismatist who could date a coin by the colour of its tarnish, and who kept in a velvet tray a worn Russian kopek, a mere hundredth of a ruble, beside a Byzantine solidus. One was an urchin grown to manhood, a foundling who had begged on the cathedral steps and never shed the wariness of the begging child. One was raffish and unshaven, laughing too loudly in the dock taverns; another was abstentious to the edge of cruelty, touching neither wine nor meat nor the warmth of company.

How a single skull could cram so many tenants is a question Pessoa answered, in one surviving note, with a figure drawn from chemistry. The imagination, he wrote, is an enzyme: it takes no visible part in the reaction, yet it hurries on the slow change by which a man becomes someone other than himself. The same handful of obsessions — exile, the sea, a lost faith — would recombine, like a few elements shuffled into endless compounds, to yield each new persona. He spoke of his one life as a thing he held at usury, lending it out at impossible interest to seventy-two debtors who could never repay.

There is in all this a faint odour of idolatry, the worship of an image set up in the place of a living person. Antiquity understood the danger and indulged it regardless; it would deify an emperor for a single victory and strike his face on a coin, so that the people might carry a god in their purse. Pessoa's procession of names was a private pageant of the same order, a costumed parade of selves, and one of the costumes was a soldier decorated for valor in a war that never took place — a courage under fire that no fire had tested. The word I, he noted in a margin, connotes a unity it has no power to deliver; it suggests far more than it can hand over.

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Full essay:

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