The Man Who Was Seventy-Five People

Fernando Pessoa was a Lisbon clerk who translated commercial correspondence for twenty-one downtown firms and, in his off-hours, was approximately seventy-five other people.

He coined a word for them. Heteronyms, not pseudonyms — full fictional authors, each with a biography, a politics, a religion, a handwriting, and a horoscope. Ricardo Reis was a classicist physician writing Horatian odes; Pessoa calculated his birth chart and determined he had been born nine and a half hours before Pessoa himself was conceived. Álvaro de Campos was a Glasgow-trained naval engineer with strong opinions about modernity. Alberto Caeiro was the master.

When his sweetheart Ofélia Queiroz tried to rekindle their romance in 1929, Pessoa had Álvaro de Campos write to her instead, explaining that his friend Fernando was not in a fit state to communicate that day. She started calling Campos o mau. The bad one. As if she had met him.

Three of the heteronyms, including Campos, named the fourth — Caeiro — as their literary master. The master was also Pessoa. They all worshipped him together.

He died at forty-seven of cirrhosis. In his bedroom stood a wooden trunk. Inside were 25,574 sheets of paper: poems, plays, philosophy, detective fiction, horoscopes, in three languages, signed by something like seventy-five different people.

All of whom were him.