Boa noite, Senhor Soares: from solitary disquiet to the adventure of love

Abstract

This paper aims to observe how the amorous practice textualized by Mario Claudio in Boa noite, senhor Soares updates a pleasure already experienced through the poetic rereading of fragments from the Livro do desassossego. Mario Claudio, a passionate reader of Fernando Pessoa and so many other artists whom he has chosen as objects of seduction, seems to have established a particular pact of fidelity with each of them that drives him to biographical writing as a way of revisiting and empathizing. In the novella Boa noite, senhor Soares, the writer moves between research and re-creation, based on Bernardo Soares’ autobiography without facts, leaving him no choice but to opt for fiction, in his desire to create a novel figure. Making the intertextual dialog a gesture of metamorphosis, Mario Claudio shifts the narrative voice, which previously belonged to Bernardo Soares, to a secondary character in Pessoa’s writing, the “office boy”, who gains a first and last name (António da Silva Felício), a voice and family ties, incorporating not only the role of narrator, but above all that of the subject seduced by the lonely semi-heteronym.