Dear fellow travellers,
In a small square in Lisbon, in front of the opera house, the chairs have been arranged for a performance. There is still time before the show begins. Apart from a sound technician eating his lunch over by the stage, we have this little Lisbon square to ourselves. We have come in search of a sculpture of a great Lisbon poet who was born in a house overlooking this square.
The sculpture, with white chairs scattered at its base, is of a figure whose face is obscured by a book. Is it Fernando Pessoa? Or perhaps Alberto Caeiro? Or Ricardo Reis? Maybe it could be Álvaro de Campos, or perhaps Bernardo Soares.
These names are all Fernando Pessoa but they are also not him. They are the most famous of the poet’s heteronyms, his literary alter egos that over years mapped Pessoa’s changing responses to modernity and the poetic tradition. Each of these Pessoa heteronyms reveal their own distinctive relationship to Lisbon’s geography. These weren’t mere pen names, but rather fully realised alternative identities with biographies, distinct literary styles and preoccupations. Sometimes they argued with each other in the letters pages of Lisbon’s newspapers and literary journals. Sometimes they argued with Pessoa himself.
“Be plural like the universe!” Pessoa scribbled on a piece of paper, perhaps while sitting at his favourite table at the Café A Brasileira alongside his fellow writers and poets.
Each of Pessoa’s heteronyms saw the city in his own way. Bernando Soares captured the soul of commercial Lisbon, transforming his daily commute in The Book of Disquiet from the Campo de Ourique to the commercial district of Baixa into a meditation on urban alienation and belonging. Another of Pessoa’s alter egos, Álvaro de Campos, supposedly a naval engineer born in Portugal but educated in Scotland, found solace in the permanence of the River Tagus at a time of profound change in the city, while Ricardo Reis viewed Lisbon from afar, a classicist physician living in Brazilian exile.
“Be plural like the universe!” Pessoa scribbled on a piece of paper, perhaps while sitting at his favourite table at the Café A Brasileira alongside his fellow writers and poets. A little over a hundred years later and the café is still there, with another statue of the writer sitting forever on the terrace outside. A small line-up of visitors queue patiently for their photograph beside the statue. Like us, they had come to Lisbon in search of Pessoa, and now they had found him.
Some of them would have read Pessoa before they arrived, exploring the city through his work in the same way one might read Joyce before Dublin, Döblin before Berlin, or any number of writers before Trieste. And this prompts me to reflect on Pessoa’s heteronyms and how, despite being the product of a single person’s imagination and dreams, they reflect how we all experience a place on our own terms, our perceptions inflected by our personal histories.
The many Pessoas contain many Lisbons, just as all of us making our way from Baixa to Chiado, on to Alfama and up the hill to Graça each has our version of the city that we are experiencing, shaped by our own interests, our personal circumstances and, yes, the books we have read.
My first experience of Paris was undoubtedly shaped by words written by Americans in a previous century, from Hemingway in a café to James Baldwin lying on his bed beneath an open window with a view across the rooftops. I walked along the river in Prague towards the Café Slavia, still half-believing I might see Václav Havel sitting at his table in the window despite the fact that the playwright-President had been dead for half a decade. My memories of Istanbul are interweaved with scenes from an Orhan Pamuk novel and his memoir, so I am no longer sure whether what I remember is something I saw with my own eyes or through his.
When I first moved to Berlin in late 2001, I saw the city beyond the tram window or as I walked the streets through the work of Christopher Isherwood and Joseph Roth, Christa Wolf and John le Carré, their words written decades before shaping my impressions of a place that I did not yet know would become my home. The neon light of a bar on Kufürstenstraße took me back to the Berlin of the 1920s. A crumbling building in Prenzlauer Berg to the East Berlin of the 1960s. A strip-lit mall by Wittenbergplatz to West Berlin with a Bowie soundtrack.
In the end, it is only when the moment comes that a street corner or a square is infused with my own memories, rather than the stories that I read in a book, that I gain a sense both of belonging and that feeling I have truly arrived.
In Lisbon, we move through a city that is both real and imagined. It is the summer of 2025 but also many pages deep into The Book of Disquiet. Perhaps it is the different versions of Lisbon in Pessoa’s writing that make the city hard to grasp. Perhaps it is the sheer volume of tourists - of which we are a part - that make the old city centre feel somewhat unreal. Perhaps it was that we simply did not stay long enough to properly arrive.
But isn’t this the joy of travel and of writing about it? That your Lisbon will not and cannot be like mine? That everyone experiences a place in their own unique way, because how we view and understand each place is shaped by what we bring to it. And that most surely includes the stories we have heard, which are told and retold by the many voices in our heads.
Paul Scraton
