how to become someone

Years ago he used to sit in front of Cafe Central selling little fake jewelry with the face of Franco on it.
To anyone who didn't care to hear of it he would tell how great Franco had been. Life had a pleasant violence. For the handsome few it gave easy living. Life had been better then,
at least for him as he now found himself humiliated in front of an indifferent mass of tourists taking the little fake jewelry with the face of Franco as something far too easy to forget.
Sitting on the pavement, selling the latest of any of his souvenirs, gambling with wallets every once in a while,
from those who had no intention at all to listen to his silly story.

In Rua da Prata he has a clean job now, taking tourists in front of Nilo to the dining room,
eager to instruct the hungry and thirsty to the plates they serve.
It is fairly difficult, not to say nearly impossible, not to get tempted.

Later he hung around in bookshops and libraries and took for pleasure the unpossessable. Thoughts,
ideas and fancies.
Not for leisure only he grabbed all that he could take, from Greek philosophers a library effortless complete,
from Wittgenstein a line or two,
but to create a model for the genius he didn't have, the unthinkable, as one may guess, unable to get to the secret garden.

Then one day at Largo do Carmo advantage he took, protected by the musing of a lighthearted night,
of a couple of tourists having a beer on a terrace there under mountain-ashes curved, absorbed by less incidental appetite. With luggage unnoticed he ran
adding Perec to the best he ever read,
as a drunk cab driver would have done, peeling distance as far as possible through deserted streets.
Again, how to become someone, he must have thought.

Later, gently asked what he had read, he indifferently would admit that he read none of it.