Globe Corner Blogs

We’d overstayed our welcome at Prazeres Cemetery. As my companion and I began walking back toward the gates, a guard came hurrying down the path, gesturing toward his wrist with the universal “we’re closing” sign. The guard directed us to go wait at the gates for him, then hurried on his rounds. We found our way back to some very tall, black iron gates, with a very thick chain locked around them. I tried not to think of what would have happened to us if the guard had not found us. The graves at Prazeres (which, strangely, means “pleasures,” in Portuguese) are, for the most part, above ground, sepulchers hold the coffins and urns of the dead. We had just been peering in on the poet Fernando Pessoa and his family, who seemed closer than was comfortable. I was relieved when the guard reappeared to let us out; I had to suppress the impulse to sprint through the opened gates.

“At least we found Pessoa,” I said to my companion as we left. It hadn’t been easy. We’d gotten the address at his house museum–that’s right, the graves have addresses. In fact, walking through Prazeres Cemetery was like walking through a miniature city. Almost all the bodies were housed in impressive mausoleums adorned with weeping statues.

Outside the cemetery we boarded the old yellow 28 tram to take us back to the city center. Our legs could not sustain anymore of Lisbon’s hills–seven to be exact, Pessoa himself tells us in the opening sentence of a guidebook the poet wrote of his city: “Over seven hills, which are as many points of observation whence the most magnificent panoramas may be enjoyed, the vast irregular and many-colored mass of houses that constitute Lisbon is scattered.”

Pessoa wrote more than a guidebook, and reading his works will give you a better sense of the city than any travel guide could. Pessoa lived in Lisbon, but wrote under more than 72 names. These weren’t just pen names; Pessoa called them heteronymns and gave each a life of their own. The most famous of these were Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis. While Pessoa’s name simply means “person” in Portuguese, he gave voice to many.

We had begun our pilgrimage that morning by perusing a bookstore Pessoa himself used to frequent, Livraria Bertrand, the oldest bookstore in Lisbon. The store is located on Rua Garrett in the neighborhood of Chiado, as is another of Pessoa’s old haunts, Cafe a Brasileira, a hot spot for writers in the 1920′s. The cafe was crammed with tourists, but we were able to snag a table next to Pessoa–that is, next to his statue, and enjoyed a few drinks as we read his poetry.

We discovered another statue of Pessoa just a block away, standing in front of his birthplace across from Teatro Sao Carlos, a book for a head. After paying our respects to the other literary folk preserved in stone around the neighborhood–including then poet Luis Camoes, his character from The Lusiads, Adamastor, and Eça de Queiroz, whose oedipal Tragedy of the Street Flowers begins at Teatro Sao Carlos and whose statue is bent over a half naked muse–we began our trek out to the neighborhood of Estrella, to the Fernando Pessoa house, where Pessoa resided for the last 15 years of his life.

The Fernando Pessoa House in Lisbon.

The outside of the Fernando Pessoa house was covered with his words. Inside we discovered a replica of the writer’s room, artifacts from his life–including his typewriter–and a small but impressive library, where I read some of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. In addition, the museum was filled with artwork inspired by Pessoa or his work, including a few masterpieces done by school children. My favorite was a child’s depiction of Fernando Pessoa’s “imaginary friends.” My companion, desiring to be counted among them, , took his place between Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos and posed for a photo.

Fernando Pessoa’s imaginary friends.

We took a break at a local pub where, unlike the more tourist infested neighborhoods, no one spoke English. The friendly waitress kept suggesting things we might eat, and I kept saying yes, though I had only a vague sense of what we were ordering, and an even lesser sense of the quantity of food. When our order arrived, it kept arriving: a platter of bread and cheese, a platter of pork, a platter of fries, a salad. We polished it off and left satisfied, heading for Prazeres Cemetery and our hunt for Pessoa’s grave.

Later, when we had returned by tram from our adventures in Prazeres, I recalled a scene in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon from Brazil upon the death of Fernando Pessoa. The premise of Saramago’s book is that characters live 9 months after their author’s death. Reis, too, felt compelled to search for the elusive writer’s grave. As I read Saramago’s description of the pilgrimage, I realized that someone had been to Prazeres before us:

“He starts to descend the road lined with poplars, in search of the grave numbered four thousand three hundred and seventy-one…The road slopes gently downward…On either side, the chapels of the family tombs are locked, the windows are covered with curtains …Eternal regret, Sad remembrance, Here lies in loving memory of, we would see the same inscriptions if we looked on the other side, angels with drooping wings, lachrymose statues, fingers entwined, folds carefully arranged, drapes neatly gathered, broken columns…Below at the height of the door’s lower hinge, another name and nothing more, that of Fernando Pessoa, with the dates of his birth and death, and the gilded outline of a funeral urn that says ‘I am here.’”

At the Tower of Belem with my DK Eyewitness Lisbon guidebook.

Our first day in Lisbon dawned clear and bright. We wandered blinking through sunny Rossio Square, down the grand grid-like avenues (designed by the Marques de Pombal after the devastating 1755 earthquake, our DK Eyewitness Lisbon guide informed us), and out into a brilliant Praça do Comércio, a wide square that opens to the Tagus River, which sparkled and danced before us.

“Looks like Lisbon has thrown off its melancholy,” my companion noted as I rushed toward the water, eager to see the line “where the earth ends and the sea begins,” a phrase Jose Saramago appropriated from Portuguese poet Camões to begin his novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

I reached the line, marked by two glistening white pillars, and bent down to touch the water. Warm waves lapped invitingly at my fingertips. I straightened and looked out to the horizon, expecting to think of distant lands, but was distracted by the immense red suspension bridge to my right, a twin to San Francisco’s Golden Gate and created by the same designer. But this wasn’t sunny California. When Saramago’s character Ricardo Reis reached these shores from Brazil, it was raining. He was lonely, searching, though he was not sure for what. He knew only that the poet Fernando Pessoa had just died.

I had a copy of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet in my pack. But I didn’t feel the disquiet that I had expected to descend upon my arrival, and I couldn’t sense the strain of sorrow that runs through almost every book I have ever read set in the city of Lisbon, from Saramago and Pessoa to John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet and Dutch author Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story. In all of these books the boundaries between life and death blur like the constant flux of the Tagus on riverbank, and everyone yearns for something they cannot have.

“It’s the Portuguese saudade that you’re after,” our host at the Lisbon Story Guesthouse, Bruno, explained when I told him I didn’t feel the same way in the real Lisbon as I did in the imagined. Saudade. I first heard the word while reading Berger, who defines it as: “the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly.”

“Saudade is a word that has no definition,” Bruno told us. “The closest I can tell you is that it is a longing for something that can never happen.” He described a Brazilian musician who conceived of the idea as a mother continually unmaking and remaking the bed of her dead child.

I looked at Bruno. “I guess if I was after that, I shouldn’t have come to Lisbon on my honeymoon. I should have waited for some heartache.”

He nodded. “You cannot help but be a tourist now. But when you live here day to day, you begin to see it. The Portuguese are a sad people, for many reasons.”
But slowly, Lisbon revealed its story to us. We had to travel outside the tourist track, beyond the popular sites like the Castle of São Jorge and Se Cathedral, to lesser known neighborhoods. On our hilly walk to the house of Fernando Pessoa and on a particularly long pilgrimage to a bookstore in Alcântara, we stumbled across neighborhoods so poor no guidebook would mention them, and into pubs where no one spoke English, yet nevertheless served us feasts. I began to look beyond the camera-toting foreigners at the Praça do Comércio and spotted a local man staring over the water, loss in his eyes. And when we went to hear the city’s music, fado, one evening, there was no mistaking the passionate yearning in the refrains: saudade.

And then, finally, because no one can avoid it, heartache came. While I was away, my grandmother, the best person on earth, was diagnosed with cancer. I walked down to the water’s edge one evening after the news had reached me. The pillars seemed paler in the half moon light, and the lights on the opposite bank were distant. Why had I been drawn to this city in the first place, I wondered. Who goes looking for melancholy on their honeymoon?

Perhaps it’s that we all have the sorrow of the Portuguese, I thought, remembering my
grandmother, but after centuries of losing loved ones to explorations and to the sea, to wars, and to a monstrous earthquake, the Portuguese have found a way to express the depths of life so beautifully that when I read the literature, listened to fado, or strolled the less-trodden streets

of Lisbon, I began to feel a longing for longing itself, until the city became a place where even melancholy took on a charm. While my heartache from home was difficult to bear, it also sharpened my sense of beauty, and on the high miradouros, or viewpoints, of Lisbon’s seven hills I often felt that I was experiencing the heights of life, a delicious vertigo I could not have known if I had not also tasted its sorrows.

New York is a city of extremes. As soon as I arrived I remembered how it was possible to love and hate the city at once. “You either sink or swim here,” Pat Carrier of the former Globe Corner bookstore told me as he guided me through the labyrinth of  publisher booths crammed inside the illogically (it seemed to me) laid out Javits Convention Center. I had come to NYC for two days of Book Expo America, beginning with an author breakfast with Stephen Colbert, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Diaz, and Jo Nesbo, the last of whom, I thought, proved funnier than our host, who kept his punch lines to Fifty Shades of Grey jokes.

After coffee with Colbert (okay, it wasn’t quite as intimate as it sounds, and listening to Colbert crack Fifty Shades jokes over blueberry muffins wasn’t exactly an appetizing way to start the day), I stepped onto the exhibition floor full of publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, and readers all conducting the business of books, which included much elbowing for the latest free advanced reader copy. I wandered disoriented among the chaos for quite some time, unsure of how exactly I fit between the world of swanky New York publishers and the woman in front of me who just jammed a display copy I am not certain was free into an already burgeoning shoulder bag of ARCs.

Unidentified BEA attendee with bags full of free books.

I felt exactly as I had when I first stumbled off my train from Boston the night before, weaving through Penn Station crowds and onto the metro–instantly overwhelmed, intimidated, and drained by the city. But when, 15 minutes later, I had emerged from the underground up onto a quiet, tree lined street in Greenwich Village, where I was lucky enough to find a room, I discovered that I could breathe again, and deeply. Perhaps it was the refreshing contrast from home, the thrill of new streets and shops to explore, perhaps it was the contrast with the crowds of the metro that made the sudden space and sunshine more charming than was their due, but I was enamored.

These extreme reactions continued at BEA, leaving me baffled at first, overwhelmed, then charmed and grateful at once. By the second day on the exhibition floor, I began to take a few faltering strokes. I found space to think and even to be inspired in a few of the educational sessions, and I began meeting people within the book industry, talking, exchanging cards. Once conversations began to open up, I began to see inside the work that was going on before my eyes. Though I had much to learn, I was no longer an outsider. Continue Reading »