Exploring Lisbon with Pessoa

As the poet Fernando Pessoa would tell you, there is no better time to visit Lisbon — “luminous Lisbon” to Pessoa — than winter. At that season, the sun is slant, the light weak and diffuse, the streets mostly empty, and the rain gusting in from the Atlantic Ocean sleeks the pavements with a damp skein which turns them a grey mother-of-pearl. Visitors who favour leathersoled shoes discover, as they walk the seven hills of Lisbon, that the streets of the Portuguese capital are paved with fine, pale, slippery stones.

I slipped of course. Everyone does. But not everyone who falls on Lisbon pavements is carrying Pessoa with them. In one hand I held the appropriately named The Book of Disquiet. I was ill-advisedly trying to open an origami popout map of Lisbon with the other hand. From the discomfort of the hard pavement, I could observe Lisbon from an unusual angle. It was a Pessoan moment, for no-one specialised more than Pessoa in observing and recording Lisbon life from unusual angles.

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Lisbon’s air “is a hidden yellow, a kind of pale yellow seen through dirty white. There is scarcely any yellow in the grey air. But the paleness of the grey has a yellow in its sadness,” according to Bernardo Soares, putative author of The Book of Disquiet .

But the term ‘author’ is a contestable one in Pessoa’s literary world. Pessoa wrote The Book of Disquiet but ascribed it to a clerk called Bernardo Soares who existed only in Pessoa’s imagination. To sustain the fable that Soares was the ‘real’ author of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa even wrote a preface to the book in his own name.

Bernardo Soares was Pessoa’s alter ego, an assistant bookkeeper who lived in a rented room and worked for a textile trading firm in the Rua dos Douradores, close to Pessoa’s own workplace. It is one of the drabber streets in the bustling commercial district of Baixa.

Here is Soares’ take on the road he calls home: “I know: if I raise my eyes, I’ll be confronted by the sordid row of buildings opposite, the grimy windows of all the downtown offices, the pointless windows of the upper floors where people still live, and the eternal laundry hanging in the sun between the gables at the top, among flower-pots and plants.”

Not much happens in Rua dos Douradores except for the occasional sound of someone practising scales. The washing still hangs between the gables. Just as Soares observed.

The description of Soares, and the circumstances of his life, as laid out in the preface to The Book of Disquiet, sound very close to those of Pessoa himself — who often ate lunch in a café in the street. Pessoa took his commitment to multiple perspectives to the point where to be ‘Fernando Pessoa’ was also to be the other poets within him — all writers with their own voices, views and personalities. Pessoa called his other writers his ‘heteronyms’ — it’s a term of his own invention. But Pessoa suggested that Soares was merely a ‘semi-heteronym’. Soares’ life was too similar to Pessoa’s own as a writer and translator of business correspondence for a firm in the Rua Augusta, which runs parallel to the Rua dos Douradores, unlike his three main heteronyms — Alberto Caeiro, a bucolic shepherd who wrote pagan poems; Ricardo Reis, a classicist in the manner of Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, a modernist with Whitmanesque leanings. Caeiro, Reis and de Campos were completely different poets, all bold enough to argue with ‘Fernando Pessoa’. Such were the literary games that entertained Pessoa.

When Pessoa died in Lisbon in 1935, a victim of liver disease brought on by heavy drinking, most of the 523 fragments of what became The Book of Disquiet were found in an envelope marked “L. do D.” (Livro do Desassossego). It was hidden away among 27,000 documents in his home — hundreds of completed poems and scraps of prose. The book had no evident design, and it is unlikely Pessoa himself could ever have finished it. Compiled and published in 1982, The Book of Disquiet is now Pessoa’s most frequently read book. In an anticipation of what has perhaps somewhat prematurely been called, at least since the 1960s, “the death of the author”, Soares philosophical musings could even be regarded as a spoof on the entire genre of wisdom literature. “Travel?” he writes. “One need only exist to travel.”

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Pessoa himself had much stronger feelings for his native city than Soares, who barely ventured even as far as the marina and port area, the evocatively named Doca do Jardim do Tobaco. Soares in The Book of Disquiet says, “I have no social or political sentiments, and yet there is a way in which I’m highly nationalistic. My nation is the Portuguese language.” Yet Pessoa himself insisted, in a memorable phrase, “To be Portuguese is to be European without the discourtesy of nationalism.”

Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa lost his father at the age of five and was taken to colonial Natal (South Africa) after his mother married the Portuguese consul in Durban. He returned to Lisbon as a young man and settled there. He never left the city again except to make a couple of trips to provincial towns. And while many modernist writers have had a strong link with a particular city — think of Joyce and Dublin, Kafka and Prague, Svevo and Trieste, Musil and Vienna — Pessoa did for Lisbon something that few other leading writers have done for their home cities. He wrote a tourist guide to the city that his own poems have since helped to remake in their image.

Fernando Pessoa walking the streets in Lisbon's Baixa district (photo courtesy of Obra Poética I/Círculo de Leitores)

This is particularly remarkable in view of the generally critical relationship that modernism has had with ‘tourism’ as an economic and cultural activity, in which it is invariably and unfavourably contrasted with travelling — although it is probably true that in the eyes of indigenous people all visitors look like tourists. Not only that: Pessoa wrote his guide in English too, perhaps at the request of one of the commercial firms which employed him. Pessoa thus directly addressed foreign visitors to Lisbon.

What the Tourist Should See is a bare eighty pages, and like nearly everything Pessoa wrote it was retrieved from manuscripts left after his death. The book imagines a voyager approaching the city from the sea, already smitten by the sight of the red roofs of Castelo and Mouraria and the dominating citadel of São Jorge, and only too eager to get through customs and on to the major sights.

This, of course, is Portuguese history in reverse, as I remarked when I took the train from the Cais do Sodré station past the famous limestone Belém Tower, which marks the ancient district from which Vasco da Gama set out for India in 1497 and Pedro Álvares Cabral for Brazil in 1500. I stayed on the train to Cascais, the upmarket resort at the northern tip of the Bay of Lisbon. Nearly all the passengers on the train sat on the left: they wanted to look out to sea, to admire the yachts sailing on the Tagus, and measure their progress along the coast by the Bugio lighthouse that stands between Lisbon and the abyss. This was where they could commune with “the ancient Portuguese speech of the sea” — as Pessoa wrote in one of his poems.

Pessoa’s guide to Lisbon is really a museum guide, since this splendid city on seven hills “which rises like a fair vision in a dream” (as he puts it in his decorous English) has always had mythical pretensions. As one of the oldest European cities it was formerly called Olissipo, in homage to Ulysses: Lisbon cannot separate itself from its revenants. Every square seems to boast massive, muscular effigies of kings and explorers whose very bulk seems to deliver a verdict on the mediocrity of the present. How did a seafaring kingdom that once commanded half the world, from Brazil in the west to entire countries on both side of Africa as well as scattered entrepôts around the coasts of Asia through its early understanding of the Atlantic gyre and the volta do mar (“turn of the sea”), retreat to this recessed position on the edge of Europe where the loudest debate on the quays is the price of cod?

The vast space of the Praça do Comércio, for instance, is crowned by the mounted effigy of King José I, his charger busily crushing snakes. This square, and nearly all the districts of the city close to the river, were rebuilt by King José’s prime minister, the First Marquis de Pombal, after the devastating earthquake of 1755. The marquis has his own statue. Camões, the great epic poet of The Lusiads, Portugal’s own Aeneid, stands on another baroque pedestal in the Chiado surrounded by less illustrious bards. Even Pessoa has been copperplated and placed outside the famous coffeehouse A Brasileira in the Rua Garrett in the Chiado district, his left leg jauntily resting on his right. Tourists can’t resist sitting next to him.

It is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate memorial to Pessoa, whose true effigy is really one of the few photographs of him in gaberdine, bow tie, specs and moustache. His loud-mouthed heteronym Álvaro de Campos even claimed on one occasion that “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”

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My most intensely Pessoan experience in Lisbon occurred in the famous eléctrico 28, one of the ramshackle but appealing narrow-gauge vintage trams which serve the hills of the city. I got on the tram in the Rua da Conceição, and found a seat at the back (seats for 20 persons, standing room for almost twice that number) as it trundled around the Chiado and slid down the Rua do Loreto in the direction of the Estrela park. The driver had to get out once to readjust the pantograph, which had become dislodged on one of the sharp bends ascending the Chiado. But we didn’t get very far. A funeral was being held in the Santa Catarina church, and a hearse was parked outside the steps to bring in the coffin. The tram had no option but to wait behind it as the bells pealed down the narrow street. Bowing to the inevitable in what appeared to be another fairly common occurrence, the driver got out of the cab again, this time to have a smoke. Half an hour later, with several other trams piled up behind us, we were able to continue the journey to Pessoa’s last home.

This was the tram to Prazeres, the cemetery where Pessoa was buried on December 2, 1935. He lived in this area for the last fifteen years of his life, and his home has been transformed into a museum, Casa Fernando Pessoa, containing his personal library, his bed and some of his school reports from South Africa. He was by all accounts a studious pupil.

At the Casa Fernando Pessoa, I picked up the exhibition catalogue: “Os lugares de Pessoa”. I used it to visit all of ‘Pessoa’s places’ in a single day, from the fourth-floor apartment on the Largo de São Carlos were he was born in 1888 (and which is now guarded by a sculpture with its head appealingly lost in a book), the Church of the Martyrs where he was christened, his Aunt Anica’s apartment on the Rua de São Bento, close to my own hotel. The Café Martinho da Arcada, an upmarket restaurant recessed in the arcade behind the Praça do Comércio, even has a little shrine to Pessoa from the days when it was called Café da Arcada, and he was a regular. It still has his favourite menu: Portuguese cabbage soup, cod and fried eggs with cheese.

The copper-plated statue of Pessoa outside the café-bar A Brasileira in the Rua Garrett, with attendant tourists (photo © Iain Bamforth).

In 1988 on the centenary of Pessoa’s birth, the writer’s remains were transferred to the famous Jerónimos Monastery in Belém where the country’s greats are buried. The monastery is the centrepiece of his What the Tourist Should See, in which he describes it as “the most remarkable monument which the capital contains.” Commissioned by King Manuel I five hundred years ago, the monastery’s western front remains a masterpiece of Renaissance stonework. Its vaults and pulpits are no less remarkable. In Pessoa’s words: “The vault which rises over the cross is an admirable work, and contains the real bronze escutcheons which belonged to the caravels that went to India and to Brazil.” Once the visitor has seen the monastery, Pessoa suggests, he will never forget it.

Strange, I thought as I walked back the few miles from Belém on those rain-slicked cobblestones, to find the mortal remains of such a timid and housebound man in such a place, glorious though it might be, and alongside those of Camões. After all, Pessoa always maintained that imaginary travel was superior to real travel. He was too busy writing — not least for all those heteronyms — to have a life. But perhaps that was the only way a twentieth-century poet could emulate Camões’ epic dispersal.

The emptiness of Pessoa’s life has a haunting quality. You only have to dip into The Book of Disquiet — which is not a book to be read cover to cover — to be seized by a strange sense of what the title suggests. In Pessoa’s own words: “I don’t know how many will have contemplated, with the attention it merits, a deserted street with people in it. This way of putting the phrase already seems to want to say something else, and indeed it does. A deserted street is not a street where nobody ventures but a street on which people walk as if it were deserted.”

Scale that up, and you have a complete urban geography of Lisbon. Walk in Pessoa’s footsteps, especially in the wet, and you’ll discover his insomnia too.