The death of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa's friend, in Paris, 1916

On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 April 1916, Mário de Sá-Carneiro asked José Araújo, a friend he had made in Paris, to come to his hotel at eight o'clock, sharp, without fail. The hotel was the Hôtel de Nice, at 29 rue Victor-Massé, in the ninth arrondissement near Pigalle, below the hill of Montmartre.4 sources4 sources

When Araújo arrived, Sá-Carneiro told him calmly that he had taken strychnine. Araújo could do nothing to save him, and stayed with him until he died. He later wrote to Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon about that evening, and his letters are the main account of it.2 sources2 sources

On the stove in the room he had left a bundle of letters for his family and friends. One last note was for Pessoa: “A great, great farewell from your poor Mário de Sá-Carneiro” (translated from Portuguese). He was three weeks short of his 26th birthday.2 sources2 sources

It cannot have come as a complete surprise to Pessoa. For a month Pessoa had been receiving letters from Paris announcing the death, cancelling it and announcing it again. Most of what we know about those weeks comes from those letters, which Pessoa kept and which are now in the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

Sá-Carneiro was born on 19 May 1890 on the third floor of number 93, Rua da Conceição, in Lisbon's Baixa, the grid of streets between the Rossio and the river. His father, Carlos Augusto de Sá Carneiro, was an army engineer from a family of officers. His mother, Águeda Maria Murinelo, died of typhoid fever at 23, when he was two.2 sources2 sources

His father was often away, so the boy grew up with his paternal grandfather, José Paulino de Sá Carneiro, at the Quinta da Vitória, a country house at Camarate on the northern edge of Lisbon. He was still staying there in his twenties; a letter to Pessoa of 23 October 1914 is headed “Camarate – Quinta da Vitória”, and the narrator of his story “A Grande Sombra” remembers a childhood there.3 sources3 sources

Money was never the problem in those years. His father took him on trips round Europe in 1904 and to Paris again in 1907. At school in Lisbon he ran a short-lived comic paper mocking his teachers, until his father had it withdrawn from the kiosk, and with a classmate, Tomás Cabreira Júnior, he wrote a play, Amizade (Friendship).3 sources3 sources

In January 1911 Cabreira took his own life at their school; the accounts differ on the day, the 8th or the 9th, and on the school. A fellow pupil remembered Sá-Carneiro going from classroom to classroom, white and trembling, to announce it. That October he enrolled to study law at Coimbra, Portugal's old university town, and gave it up in December.3 sources3 sources

He probably met Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon early in 1912. Pessoa, two years older, was then known as a critic for the magazine A Águia. On 29 August Sá-Carneiro gave him a copy of his new book of novellas, Princípio (Beginning), with a dedication.3 sources3 sources

On 12 October 1912 he left Lisbon on the Sud-Express, the night train to Paris, to study law at the Sorbonne. He did not finish that course either. Four days later he sent Pessoa a postcard of the Champs-Élysées: “Just a great embrace for today.” By the end of the year he was telling him that the day they met had been “a beautiful day in my life” (both translated from Portuguese).3 sources3 sources

That was the pattern for the next three and a half years. Sá-Carneiro moved between Paris and Lisbon; Pessoa stayed in Lisbon. Sá-Carneiro sent him more than 200 letters, postcards and telegrams, about five a month, and more than 400 letters to all his correspondents over the same years. Pessoa's replies are almost all lost.3 sources3 sources

The letters are full of literary business: poems copied out for Pessoa's opinion, proofs, plans for magazines, requests to collect money from Lisbon booksellers. They are also funny. Sá-Carneiro called himself the “fat sphinx” and drew ever crueller caricatures of himself in words. The scholars who edited the letters, Ricardo Vasconcelos and Jerónimo Pizarro, set out to correct the picture of a lonely, melancholy flâneur drifting between cafés.4 sources4 sources

Pessoa had his own debt to the friendship. In a famous letter of 1935 he said that Alberto Caeiro, one of his main heteronyms, was born of a plan to play a trick on Sá-Carneiro by inventing a bucolic poet and passing him off as real.1 source1 source

His first two years in Paris produced his best-known poems. The 12 poems of Dispersão (Dispersion) are dated Paris, February to May 1913. He published the book himself in Lisbon in 1914, “at the author's house” in the Travessa do Carmo, in 250 copies with a cover by the designer José Pacheco.1 source1 source

The poems keep returning to one idea: a self that has broken into pieces and cannot find itself. The title poem opens “I got lost inside myself / Because I was a labyrinth.” In “Quasi” (Almost) the speaker is always one step short of what he reaches for.1 source1 source

The same year he published A Confissão de Lúcio (Lúcio's Confession), a short novel set in the art world of Paris and Lisbon. Its narrator, Lúcio Vaz, has served ten years in prison for killing the poet Ricardo de Loureiro, a crime he says he did not commit. In the climax Ricardo fires a revolver at his wife Marta, but it is Ricardo who falls dead, and Marta vanishes. Ricardo has told Lúcio that he “created” her.1 source1 source

Critics read the book as a story of doubles and of desire between two men; Ricardo tells Lúcio he could not “possess” a person of his own sex. Ricardo Vasconcelos points out that Sá-Carneiro's fiction was questioning, as early as 1912, whether there are only two sexes. The novel's epigraph came from a prose piece by Pessoa about two people unsure which of them is the other.4 sources4 sources

The war brought him home. He went back to Paris in July 1914, and when the fighting began he returned to Lisbon in September. There he and Pessoa took up a plan they had made earlier that year for a new magazine.3 sources3 sources

Orpheu came out in March 1915 and a second issue in June. The story of its launch and of the uproar in the Lisbon press is told in our article on Pessoa's death. Sá-Carneiro's part in it was larger than is often remembered: his father paid the printer, he and Pessoa were named as directors of the second issue, and Pessoa dedicated “Opiário”, a poem by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, to him in the first.4 sources4 sources

The papers made him their main target. Unlike Pessoa he already had books in print, and his poems had the strangest images. In Orpheu 2 he printed “Manucure”, a parody of Futurism. A Lisbon daily called him a “mastodontic lad with the soul of a child”, and to the press he was the most crackpot of all the crackpots.3 sources3 sources

On 11 July 1915 he left for Paris again, abruptly and without saying goodbye. A third issue of Orpheu was set in proof, but on 13 September he wrote that they would have to give it up. His father, angry at the “exorbitant bill”, had gone to work for the railways in Mozambique. Jerónimo Pizarro doubts that money was the real reason; he thinks the father no longer wanted to fund a magazine that made his son look mad.2 sources2 sources

In Paris he took a room at the Hôtel de Nice and asked Pessoa to keep the address to himself. Money was the subject of almost every letter. He asked Pessoa to chase the bookseller for the proceeds of Céu em Fogo, his new collection of novellas, and begged for an answer by telegram.2 sources2 sources

By early 1916 his tone had changed. “Didn't I tell you I was mad? I have been living for weeks in a nameless hell,” he wrote on 18 February. He had begun an affair with a woman whom his friends in Paris later blamed for his ruin. On 31 March he wrote the letter that made the end explicit.3 sources3 sources

He needed 500 francs by Monday, he explained, and a telegram to his father seemed to have gone astray. He would post Pessoa his notebook of poems, to publish as if it were his own, and asked him to add a quatrain that began “When I die, bang on tin cans”.1 source1 source

On Monday 3 April he wrote again: today was the day. He asked Pessoa to break the news to his grandfather and to his old nurse. The next day a postcard told Pessoa to ignore his letters. A long letter explained that the woman had gone looking for him, found him in a café and gone off to find him money. She had also tried the Portuguese consulate, where the consuls told her, smiling, not to worry: they knew who he was, the leader of “a certain magazine of madmen” (translated from Portuguese). On 6 April a one-word telegram followed: “Bien.”4 sources4 sources

It was a reprieve, not a recovery. “Money is not everything,” he wrote on 17 April. “Today, for example, I have money.” He was living, he said, “one of my characters... with one of my characters”. The next day he sent a few lines begging Pessoa to write: “Mad! Mad! Mad! Have great pity on me” (both translated from Portuguese). Eight days later he was dead.3 sources3 sources

Pessoa heard the news from Carlos Ferreira, another Portuguese friend in Paris, who wrote the next day: “Fill yourself with courage... Mário killed himself yesterday” (translated from Portuguese). Sá-Carneiro was buried on 29 April in the suburban cemetery of Pantin, in a plot rented for five years. The grave no longer exists. Lisbon's Diário de Notícias carried a short notice on 4 May.1 source1 source

He left debts, so the hotel kept his trunk until they were paid. Inside, his friends believed, were his manuscripts, Pessoa's letters and the unfinished prose piece Mundo Interior. In September 1918 Pessoa wrote to the hotel manager asking for it. When his father, who had come from Mozambique, finally opened the trunk, it held only old clothes. Observador's two accounts date that visit to 1918 and to 1928.2 sources2 sources

Not everything went into the trunk. Letters published in 2017 show that on 2 May 1916 Ferreira and Araújo packed up his belongings and Ferreira quietly kept “the best unpublished pieces”. What became of them is unknown. In 1934 Pessoa still hoped the first chapter of Mundo Interior, which he had heard Sá-Carneiro read aloud in Lisbon, might turn up somewhere.1 source1 source

Pessoa became his friend's editor. In November 1924 he printed six of Sá-Carneiro's unpublished poems in the Lisbon magazine Athena, as “The last poems of Mário de Sá-Carneiro”, beside a prose tribute of his own.3 sources3 sources

On 26 April 1926, the tenth anniversary, Pessoa wrote as Álvaro de Campos the poem “Se te queres matar, porque não te queres matar?” (“If you want to kill yourself, why don't you want to kill yourself?”). In 1935, the year of his own death, he wrote a poem called “Sá-Carneiro”, meant for an issue of Orpheu that would be made “with suns and stars in a new world”.2 sources2 sources

The verses Sá-Carneiro wanted added to his poems, asking for tin cans, clowns and acrobats at his funeral, closed the Athena selection and became known as “Fim” (The End). The title is generally credited to Pessoa; Sá-Carneiro never gave it one, and the 2017 critical edition prints it untitled. Indícios de Oiro appeared as a book in 1937, two years after Pessoa died.5 sources5 sources

For decades his suicide shaped how he was read, as if every poem were a step towards the hotel room. Ricardo Vasconcelos, of San Diego State University, argues the other way: “We don't read Sá-Carneiro because of his suicidal character. We read him because he has an incredible power of imagery and metaphor” (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

The centenary brought him new editions. Tinta-da-China published the letters to Pessoa as Em Ouro e Alma in 2015 and the first critical edition of his complete poetry in 2017. In 2016 the Biblioteca Nacional held an exhibition, “o homem são louco” (“the sane madman”), named after Pessoa's phrase for him.3 sources3 sources

He also travels. Lúcio's Confession is available in English in Margaret Jull Costa's translation, and the poet Helder Macedo has recalled that Ted Hughes translated three of his poems in the early 1960s. In the late 1980s the Portuguese band Trovante set “Fim” to music.2 sources2 sources