The Inventory of Aurélio Pessoa

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 ...