Giuseppe Cafiero

Mario de Sa-Carneiro Giuseppe Cafiero

The apparent suicide in 1916 of the writer MÃrio de SÃ-Carneiro causes his friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, great distress. Pessoa feels compelled to trace SÃ-Carneiro's final movements, to better understand what could have caused him to lose all hope.

Exploring byways of the imagination and ambiguity with the investigator David Mondine and Dr. AbÃlio Fernandes Quaresma, solver of enigmas, the three men decide to uncover the conclusive certainties which led MÃrio to poison himself.

These suicide investigators travel to Lisbon - MÃrio's birthplace - and to Paris, talking to strangers and friends who might shed light on the poet's mysterious and sudden decline. As the city wrestles with the grief and tumult of war, the men hold court at the cafes and bistros MÃrio would have frequented. Their witty, enigmatic and sometimes obscure conversations illuminate the friendship between MÃrio and Fernando Pessoa, their poetry and their literary ambitions, revealing the tragic end of one of the founders of Portuguese modernism.