O Que Tens
“O Que Tens” is formally simple: a mysterious short story inscribed on an old Portuguese mirror. Both the antique style of the mirror and the old fashioned font have a storybook quality, leading us to expect a fable or a nursery rhyme, homey and familiar. Instead, we read,
One day as I was walking home a man I’d never seen before said to me, “I wish I had what you have! Always smiling.” I wish I had what I have, too.
The tension between the form of the artwork and its content creates a moment of uncanniness, reflexivity, or perhaps a feeling of curious detachment. We see ourselves on the surface of the mirror, or, as in the text, through the eyes of a stranger, and experience a momentarily slippage - sudden self-consciousness, or even not identifying the “I” that’s reflected back with the “I” that we experience as ourselves. The story leaves several questions unanswered. Is the man truly a stranger, if he addresses “me” familiarly? Am “I” an unreliable narrator, if I am unfamiliar to myself?