Bernardo Soares did not exist, not in a tactile way. Yet he did buy bananas in this city and ride its yellow trams. He dreamt here. He nursed a coffee in this cafe, watching people cross the square, just as I’m doing now, emulating the man who technically wasn’t.
On paper, Bernardo worked as an assistant bookkeeper in a fabrics firm a few blocks from here. He clocked in. Balanced numbers. Or as he put it: “Every day I meticulously write the lines of the epic commercial poem that is Vasques & Co.”
He also kept a diary of sorts, a stream of inklings committed to sheets of paper, stored in a loose-leaf bundle on Rua dos Douradores, where Bernardo lived alone. If not for the work of Maria Aliete Galhoz, and other literary detectives to comb the apartment in subsequent years, those pages would never have outlived Bernardo himself.
Gratefully, his words now lie beside my coffee. Typed, bound, they make up the Book of Disquiet, as written by Fernando Pessoa, a man who knew Bernardo well. I had no idea about the work before buying it. I’d not heard of Pessoa, or his make-believe bookkeeper. Rather I’d been seeking a voice to help me decode Lisbon in some small way, and Disquiet came to the rescue.
Better than a map, deeper than a guidebook, the right work of fiction translates a city. Last month, I spent 10 days in the Portuguese capital, enriched by Pessoa’s words. (“I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life.”) Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobelist, labelled Pessoa as “the solemn investigator of futile things”.
A day will come when I no longer see this [street], when the bananas by the side of the pavement will continue to exist without me.
Fernando himself, ventriloquising his clerk, declared people as “a series of parentheses in the book of life”. By now you get a sense of the novel’s tone, a workaday ponder on life’s torpid cycle, from bed to office, from tram to shop: “A day will come when I no longer see this [street], when the bananas by the side of the pavement will continue to exist without me”.
“I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life”.Credit:Shutterstock
Yet this is Pessoa’s glory as much as the man’s intrigue. It’s why this cafe on this plaza has a table in constant reserve for the author who’s been dead 85 years. It’s all about the words he wrote. Bananas will come and go, but Fernando’s throwaway thoughts will live in Lisbon hearts forever.
Not that he courted publication. Fernando worked as Bernardo had worked, haunting a downtown office by the river, keeping the books, jotting his daydreams dark and poetic, capricious and wistful, stowing the lot in a cupboard. His words only appeared in public 47 years after Pessoa’s death, the pages shuffled into one cryptic narrative.
Bernardo Soares, the character to speak the journal, was far more than a pseudonym for Pessoa. The label he preferred was heterônimo, Pessoa owning a dozen masks across his career, where each pen-name determined the writing’s style and form. In Portuguese, the word “pessoa” means person, which sets me wondering whether Pessoa itself was a secondary alias behind the mirror.
Either way, there is a hallowed table beside me, topped by the author’s hat and brandy. Uptown a bronze replica of Pessoa sits cross-legged, a selfie opportunity at Café A Brasileira. “I enjoy using words,” he wrote, channelling Soares. “Or rather I enjoy making words work.” A century later, Bernardo/Fernando would delight to see the linguistic payoff.
When next you travel, be that Perth or Peru, consider your destination’s fiction, be that Kafka (Prague) or Finland’s Moomintrolls. For Lisbon I chose a guide called Pessoa and the city opened her arms.
davidastle.com
twitter.com/dontattempt
Source: Read Full Article