Young Pessoa

Since both parents were literary in their different ways, they did not find it strange that Fernando chose words as his favorite playthings. As the small boy rode on the streetcar with his mother, it tickled him to call out each letter of the signs they passed. This caused a fellow passenger to remark on his unusual ability to recite from memory what he had previously heard his mother spell out. No, she corrected, he already recognized all the letters of the alphabet.28 By age four he was reading whole sentences.

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While Pessoa the adult would retain certain childlike traits, the young boy named Fernando already possessed a grown-up sense of his own dignity. Shy but not easily intimidated, he despised being treated with condescension, no matter how innocent or good-humored. When a family friend from the Azores finally laid eyes on the bright five-year-old he had heard so much about, he hoisted the boy up in his arms, saying, “Pleased to meet you! I’ve been very curious to make your acquaintance.” Fernando, with his feet back on the ground, smoothed the ruffles out of his suit and commented with a dash of pique in his voice, “So now your curiosity has been satisfied.”30 Proud and independent, occasionally even insolent, Fernando was at the same time mild-mannered, timorous, preferring indoor games to rough outdoor play. He could be violent in his words, never in actions. He was also, already, a very private individual.

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But nothing better illustrates the boy’s intellectual precocity than his astonishing performance at school. A foreigner who arrived at Durban with practically no English, he was soon at the top of his class—and not because of his skill in mathematics. In fact, “top of his class” states only half the case, since he left his class behind and jumped ahead. Although he had had a year and a half of (probably at-home) schooling in Lisbon, his lack of English meant he had to start all over in Durban, where he completed the five-year primary school program in just three years. At a graduation ceremony on December 20, 1898, the school would award Fernando the Examination Prize for all-around academic excellence, the First Prize in Latin, and, most remarkably, the First Prize in English.20In addition to Latin, English, and arithmetic, Fernando’s class schedule during his last year of primary school included geometry, history, science, and French. Some subjects were taught on alternate days; Latin was taught every day, Monday through Friday. So was English, but the Tuesday and Thursday classes were devoted specifically to poetry. Two hours of weekly poetry instruction seems to have been a peculiarity of the convent school rather than a standard feature of the fifth-grade curriculum in South Africa. Black-robed and white-bibbed Catholic nuns, while they may not have served as inspiring muses, were the ones who instilled an early love of poetry in Fernando. It was in the form of a poem that he scrawled a warning to would-be thieves in the front of Principia Latina, his Latin primer, opposite the flyleaf where his class schedule was affixed:

Don’t steal this book

For fear of shame

For in it is

The owner’s name.

And if I catch

Him by the tail

He’ll run off

To Durban gaol.†

At the back of the textbook he wrote a bilingual message, in English and French, instructing whoever might find the book to return it to him at his home address. In February 1898 Fernando, four months away from his tenth birthday, was flaunting his still rudimentary skills as a linguist and poet.

From: PESSOA

A Biography

Richard Zenith