“If there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me.”
THE BRITISH NOVELIST Gabriel Josipovici begins his essay on Pessoa by remarking that “When I think of what is most radical in the literature of the past hundred years, of what embodies most clearly the essential spirit of modernism, I think of five grey-suited gentlemen: Constantin Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, and Jorge Luis Borges. Each belongs to a city and has made that city his own: Alexandria, Prague, London, Lisbon, Buenos Aires” (27). Yet, as Alfred MacAdam reminds us in the preface to his translation of The Book of Disquiet, Lisbon itself actually plays only a marginal role in Soares’s “factless autobiography,” unlike Dublin, of which James Joyce gives us such precisely detailed descriptions in Ulysses. MacAdam then astutely relates The Book, not to the actual city in which it is set, but to the imaginary realm that Jorge Luis Borges created in his short story “The Library of Babel.”
Both The Book and “The Library of Babel” provoke uncanny effects by treating open and enclosed spaces as though they were interchangeable. Borges blurs the distinction between them in the opening sentence of his story, which reads: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries” (Labyrinths 51). The reciprocity thus created recurs in the narrator’s later claim that “my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite” (52). He then combines the enclosed geometrical figure of the hexagon with indefiniteness in a rewriting of the mystical definition of God: “The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible” (52). A limited set of letters and punctuation marks, in its turn, combines to produce an indefinite multiplicity of books: “he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols” (54). Throughout the entire story, the labyrinth itself is implicitly present as a space that, while enclosed, nonetheless invites a potentially infinite number of possible meanderings.
This subversion of the logical distinction between the greater and the lesser as well as between the open and the enclosed—which permits the boundless universe to be contained within the restricted space of the library and, conversely, the library to become boundless—receives yet another uncanny inflection when we learn of the theory according to which somewhere within the library there exists a “total book,” which the narrator describes as “the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest” (56). A concluding footnote offers what may be a plausible rationale for this idea: “Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves” (58).
The Book of Disquiet contains, if not an infinite number of pages, then certainly hundreds of separate pages that, if published as a boxed rather than as a bound edition, could be arranged in virtually infinite combinations. Like the narrator of “The Library of Babel,” Soares himself combines a bounded geometric figure with the indefinite when he describes himself as “the center that exists only in the geometry of the abyss” (228). Like the library itself, his fourth-floor rented room expands until it “becomes” the universe and, like the “total book,” the smallest of his fragments becomes “the formula and perfect compendium” of the hundreds of disparate texts that Pessoa left behind at the time of his death.
Again like Borges’s narrator, Soares explicitly invokes the image of the labyrinth at several points in The Book. In one allusion, he expresses his desire “To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea [ . . . ] the ocean spray of far-off fountains, and all the uncertainty of parks at night, lost in endless tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!” (33). In another, he yearns to “shake off this state of suspension” that seems to keep him from contact with his true self and to discover “a more intimate thinking, a feeling that’s more mine, a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am” (115). The city of Lisbon itself acquires a labyrinthine aspect in the midst of Soares’s nocturnal wandering: “I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates—heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal” (191).
This resemblance between the Lisbon of The Book and Borges’s library is alluded to at least indirectly by many critical comments on Soares’s “unwritten novel.” Françoise Laye, for example, points to the ease with which Soares moves back and forth between a realistic and an imaginary portrayal of Lisbon, which she traces to its source in “a boundless narcissism that creates a constant back and forth movement between Pessoa as the creator and Soares as his creature” (12). Washington Dener dos Santos suggests an even closer identification when he describes The Book (in a way that will remind us of Borges) as an expression of its author’s “interior labyrinth” as well as of the “regular geometry of the city” (77). Soares himself substantiates this idea of his inhabiting a recognizably Borgesian realm when he remarks that he can “dream simultaneously of a real sunset over the real Tagus River and a dreamed morning on an inner Pacific Ocean” (435) and that “it’s the fifth corner [of the world] that I travel in, and it belongs to me” (123). The narcissistic motivation underlying his imaginative refashioning of the real world especially comes to the fore when he exclaims “If there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me! If I could at least meet the friends I’ve dreamed of, walk along the streets I’ve created, wake up amid the racket of roosters and hens in the early morning rustling in the country house where I pictured myself” (90; my emphasis).
Before looking more closely at the blurring of the boundary between the real and the imaginary that permeates The Book, let us recall that Pessoa remade Lisbon as a “paradise regained” in not one but two prose works, the other being a little guidebook entitled Lisbon: What Every Tourist Should Know. Pessoa’s native city, as portrayed both in The Book and in Lisbon, fulfills—albeit, in two completely contrasting ways—the aspiration to which Soares gives voice when he evokes the experience of being alone in a normally crowded place: “We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and—as I said—of relief and serenity” (338; my emphasis). Both Soares and Pessoa’s model tourist “own” Lisbon in highly gratifying ways. To begin with, the existence of other living people is significantly marginalized in both works. In The Book, they are, with few exceptions, reduced to an anonymous and insignificant mass. As Rhian Atkin has observed, “while Lisbon is purportedly what inspires Soares’s writings, his introspective, self-indulgent attitude and his rejection of action actually mean that the physiognomy of the city is largely overlooked, and its inhabitants are grouped together with little attention to any particularly lisboeta traits that they may have” (159).
We may remember, in this respect, Soares’s tribute to “the stillness of early summer evenings downtown, and especially the stillness made more still by contrast, on the streets that seethe with activity by day” (13) and his description of his ability, in the midst of his routine bookkeeping activities in the office of Vasques’s company, to have a vision that conflates open and enclosed spaces and in which he shares “the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world” (15; my emphasis). The guide who conducts the tour in Lisbon is, like Soares, a nearly solitary figure, his only companion being the tourist himself. Every other inhabitant of the city—including the various artists and political figures whose achievements he celebrates—has been dead for years if not centuries. The virtual effacement of daily events in both works also contributes to this effect. Nothing except sightseeing actually happens in Pessoa’s guidebook. In The Book, events, such as they are, tend to alternate between long stretches of tedium and sudden, visionary moments, neither of which have any direct connection with the daily life of the other inhabitants of Lisbon.
Rogelio Orónez Blanco explains in his introduction to Béatrice Verne’s French translation of Pessoa’s guidebook that its author’s idealizing portrayal of the city of his birth was inspired by his recognition of the greatly diminished role played by Portugal on the world stage, a circumstance of which he became particularly aware during his childhood years in Durban, where “he was able to observe the abysmal ignorance that prevailed with respect to the historical importance of the Portuguese people, which led him to think seriously of writing a guide which would restore his country to its rightful place” (11).
Given this implied ambition, it is not surprising that Pessoa makes constant use of strategies—particularly, his constant resort to superlatives—that effectively imbue public monuments, historical figures, and creative artists with a resplendent aura that places them at the summit of a pervasively invoked hierarchical order. Not only is Lisbon encircled by seven literal hills; it is, as well, teeming with innumerable figurative pinnacles of human greatness and artistic achievement. The gallery of great creators begins with Brother João Turriano, who devised the plans of the Bugio Lighthouse. The strategy of praising past glories is sounded here by the remark that the Tower of Belém is “a magnificent specimen of sixteenth century military architecture, in the romanic-gothic-moorish style” (11), high praise to which Pessoa will return in his later remark that it is the “one of the finest monuments in Lisbon and one of the most expressive memories of Portuguese military and naval power” (60). The superlative mode at work here continues in the observation that the Tagus River is “one of the largest natural ports in the world, with ample anchorage for the greatest fleets” (11; my emphasis).
Pessoa then proposes to serve as the tourist’s “cicerone,” one who will show him “the monuments, the gardens, the more remarkable buildings, the museums—all that is in any way worth seeing in this marvelous Lisbon” (12–13; my emphasis). He rarely misses an occasion to boast of the larger-than-life dimensions of each of these points of interest, taking note, for example, of the Royal Pantheon of the House of Braganza, whose corridor alone measures “17 metres long and 4 1/2 wide” (28). Evidence of Pessoa’s patriotic ambition may also be noted in the passages relating to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, whose “fine paintings and sculptures dating from 1850 onwards” are the work of dozens of artists whose names he only too willingly shares with the tourist. These, along with the sculptures, drawings, and water-colours that also contribute their individual excellences to the glory of the collection as a whole lead him to conclude that “There is, in fine, much to see and to admire in the museum, which is fitly installed” (37), a comment that underlines the importance of respect for both hierarchy and proportion.
The cicerone’s description in Lisbon of the National Library, unlike Borges’s of the Library of Babel, is firmly grounded in empirically observable details that are designed to elicit—not the dizzying experience of the uncanny that we remember from the Borges story—but the comparatively mundane experience of heightened admiration. We learn—among other eminently plausible as well as doubtlessly impressive features—that it “has 11 rooms and 14 passages, on two floors, and contains 360,000 volumes.” The quantitative measure of the library’s excellence is matched by the qualitative when the cicerone tells us that the upper floor houses “the very important Reserved Book room, which contains the rarer works, real bibliographic relics, some unique copies, specimens of rare binding and illustration, manuscripts, coins, and many written documents of all kinds, all of which form a bibliographic collection worthy of the greatest possible care” (38). This strategy of convincing the tourist as to the special excellence of the sites to which his attention is drawn reappears in his praise of the Archeological Museum, which, along with containing innumerable historically important objects, is also graced with a principal entrance which, “formed by a doorway with six ogive arches, is one of the finest of its time” (42).
We notice, furthermore, that the cicerone takes pride, not only in the remarkable dimensions and special excellence of each of the sites to which he calls the tourist’s attention, but in the aesthetically pleasing whole to which each part contributes. This is noticeably true, for example, of his description of the Praça do Commercio:
It is a vast space, perfectly square, lined on three sides by buildings of uniform type, with high stone arches [ . . . ] The fourth, or South side of the square is formed by the Tagus itself [ . . . ] In the center of the square stands the bronze equestrian statue of King José I, a splendid sculpture by Joachim Machado de Castro, cast in Portugal, in a single piece, in 1774 [ . . . ] On the North side of the square, facing the river, there are three parallel streets; the middle one issues from a magnificent triumphal arch of great dimensions, indubitably one of the largest ones in Europe. (15–16)
A similar attention to wholeness and harmony leads him to regret (in a remark that may be taken as an amusing, although doubtlessly unintended, allusion to The Book itself) that the Lisbon Cathedral, which had been damaged by several earthquakes, has been “very badly restored, since its present state shows the lack of a definite plan on the part of the several ‘restorers.’” He hopes that the restoration undertaken by António Couto “will put some artistic unity into the cathedral” (32–33). A bit later in the tour, the Monastery of the Jerónimos elicits, by contrast, the cicerone’s unconditional praise as “the most remarkable monument which the capital contains” (54). He reminds us of the contribution made by quantity to the unforgettable impression that the monastery creates via his mention of the stone-work, which is “full of niches, of statues, of reliefs, arms and emblems.” Shifting his attention to quality, he then praises the “exquisite harmony” of the aggregate, which itself testifies to the presence in Portugal at the time of its construction of “the greatest masters of stone-work, both national and foreign” (54–55).
In keeping with its focus on specifically urban forms of human achievement, Lisbon rigorously restricts mention of the natural world to descriptions of the city’s formal gardens. For the cicerone, “nature shows us many of her choicest specimens” (48) only on those limited occasions when the “finest gardens” become the object of his attention. Especially relevant examples include the Campo Grande, which, we learn is “one of the finest parks in the city [ . . . ] over a kilometer in length and about 200 metres broad throughout” and containing “valuable specimens of exotic trees, ornamental plants, flowers, etc.” (25) and an unnamed garden, also praised as “one of the finest gardens in Lisbon,” which “contains some fine specimens of trees, the most remarkable one being a spreading cedar, the branches of which, resting on iron-work, cover ground enough to hold some hundreds of persons” (44).
The Lisbon to which the cicerone pays such superlative homage in his guidebook is, to be sure, the same city in which Bernardo Soares lives, works, and writes—but seen from an entirely different perspective. Soares alludes repeatedly to the tedium of his daily life, which is never relieved by the inspiring sight of a magnificent historical monument or an impressive public square. In place of such touristic attractions, we find frequent mention of such utterly unworthy places as the office in which he works, the restaurant in which he meets the stranger, the tavern across the street, the fourth-floor rented room from whose window he gazes, and the barbershop in which he learns of the barber’s death. The great historical figures—whose devotion to the active life led to the rebuilding of Lisbon out of the rubble left by the 1755 earthquake—are replaced by Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who regularly expresses his disdain for “men of action.” The note of patriotic pride that echoes throughout Lisbon is likewise replaced by Soares’s “disquiet.”
Although he suffers from attacks of anxiety unknown to the cicerone, Soares possesses remarkable literary gifts that give him access to blissful experiences that are not, on the evidence of the guidebook, available to even the most elated of tourists. The pleasure afforded to the tourist depends upon conventional judgments of comparative worth that allow the cicerone to establish hierarchies of merit. Soares’s bliss, by contrast, is generated by uncanny reciprocities between the worthy and the worthless. In Lisbon, the most admirable monuments and public spaces are placed on a pinnacle, whereas in The Book, the most negligible object constantly becomes a gateway to the infinite.
In Lisbon, Pessoa had directed our attention inward: beginning with a panoramic view of the city, he then introduced the tourist to individual buildings, monuments, public gardens, and squares that contribute to its wholeness and harmony. In The Book, however, he moves in the opposite direction by treating the panorama as merely part of an immeasurably larger space. Pessoa’s tourist arrives in Lisbon aboard a boat that is sailing up the Tagus. From there, he disembarks and begins a journey whose temporal and spatial coordinates are clearly specified: “We shall now ask the tourist to come with us. [ . . . ] Right in front of the wharf he has just left is the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos [ . . . ] A little further on [ . . . ] let us notice this square [ . . . ] Our car moves on, goes through the Rua do Arsenal, and passes the town hall [ . . . ] ” (12-14). In The Book, however, the Tagus is associated with two forms of outward journey: the literal ones undertaken by the Portuguese navigators in the 16th century and the visionary journey that takes place in Soares’ imagination as he contemplates the river. At particularly intense moments of reverie, he tells us that “the Tagus is an endless Atlantic and Cacilhas another continent, or even another universe” (111)—a comment that restages from his subjective point of view an experience that was literally true for the Portuguese sailors.
Poetic images such as this one, which shift our attention from real to imaginary voyages, appear intermittently throughout The Book. At one point, the Tagus becomes “a blue lake, and the hills of the far shore are a flattened Switzerland” (71) while at another Soares associates it with “distant idylls along streams” (102) and tells us that “the dark reeds by the river sleep coldly in the sunset” (315). One of the most memorable of these images (which unites the river to boundless time) occurs when he imagines “great bridges joining the two dark shores of a moonlit river leading to the ancient seas” (426). The specific, bounded river becomes once again interchangeable with the indefinite when Soares, reflecting on the emotional cost of his yearning for impossible things, tells us that “The sensation we come to have of ourselves is of a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks” (171–2). The pervasiveness of such images may lead us to surmise that—unlike the tourist, who arrives in Lisbon on the Tagus—Soares leaves it on a journey—not to the actual England of which Pessoa had dreamed as an adolescent—but to a utopian realm in which boundlessness is the norm: “I have entered, Lord, that port. I have wandered, Lord, over that sea. I have gazed, Lord, at that invisible chasm” (114).
The disappearance of hierarchies based on firmly maintained distinctions between the worthy and the worthless that notice in The Book will become especially apparent if, having in mind the description of the monumental Praça do Commercio in Pessoa’s guidebook, we now consider Soares’s quite different experience of an unnamed—and otherwise unremarkable—square that he observes from the terrace of an equally uncelebrated café:
From the terrace of this café I look at life with tremulous eyes. I see just a little of its vast diversity concentrated in this square that’s all mine. A slight daze like the beginning of drunkenness reveals to me the soul of things. Visible, unanimous life proceeds outside me in the clear and distinct steps of passing pedestrians, in the regulated fury of their motions. In this moment when my feelings are but a lucid and confused mistake, when my senses have stagnated and everything seems like something else, I spread my wings without moving, like an imaginary condor. (373; my emphasis)
Whereas the cicerone wrote about Lisbon with a specific rhetorical intention in mind (impressing the reader with an image of the city’s grandeur), Soares “unwrites” it in passages such as this one in order to achieve his poetical goal of achieving access to “a plane beyond logic and space-time reality [that] is one of our modes of existence, a sensation of ourselves in another dimension of being” (74). The dissolution of the hierarchies so dear to the cicerone enables Soares to declare—as the cicerone certainly could not have—that “In the vast whirlwind where the whole world turns like so many dry leaves, kingdoms count no more than the dresses of seamstresses, and the pigtails of blond girls go round in the same mortal whirl as the scepters that stood for empires” (178).
The reversible relationship between the greater and the lesser, the higher and the lower, the larger and the smaller, etc. that takes us beyond “space-time reality” is memorably expressed by Soares’s remark that “Every point of view is the apex of an inverted pyramid, whose base is indeterminate” (86), which clearly transports us to a perceptual and cognitive realm far from the cicerone’s conventionally monumental Lisbon. In Soares’s Lisbon, apexes that radiate outwards to embrace indeterminate space are both axiomatic and pervasive. At one moment, the apex will be the Tagus and the indeterminate base the infinite sky: “When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky, my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity” (103). At another, the Tagus will be replaced by the narrow street on which Soares lives: “I step over to my window overlooking the narrow street, I look at the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free, with a winged splendor whose fluttering sends a shiver throughout my body” (47).
Similar reciprocities emerge when Soares observes that “A sunny day transports us from a café on a narrow side street to wide-open fields” (35) and that “Silence emerges from the sound of the rain and spreads in a crescendo of grey monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything” (42). The blurred distinction between the nearby and the distant returns again in his remarks that “the sky’s blue began to spread over the street’s paving-stones” (31) and that “There is, at this hour, a disquieting harmony, extending from the visible invisibility of everything to the slightly rough wood of the white sill, where my left hand rests sideways on the old, cracked paint” (49). Similar conflations—based ultimately on the reciprocity between part and whole—appear when Soares describes the Tagus as an “endless Atlantic” and speaks of clouds being so huge it seems they’ll fill the whole sky” (178) and others that “vanish into the abolished mass of sky” (180). They likewise allow him to declare that “I strolled down the avenue of my small room” (31), that “the silence of the house touches infinity” (34), and that the shadow of a tree, the sound of water falling into a pool, and the grass of a trimmed lawn “are in this moment the whole universe for me” (97). Soares’s hazy visual perceptions contribute to this effect when he observes that “right now it seems to me that the landscape is all a fog, and that the buildings are the fog that hides it” (68) and when he informs us that his nearsightedness makes a simple nocturnal street scene seem “monstrous, unintelligible, and unreal” (191) or that, looking out on the city at night, all he sees are things that “are hardly distinguishable in the blackness of the night” (362).
Reciprocities also lead Soares to find “abysses” in highly unlikely urban settings, as when he remarks that “I throw an empty matchbox towards the abyss that’s the street . . . not another sound can be heard, except the sound of the whole city” (98) or when he observes that “At the end of the street—a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded” (136). Such perceptions as these confirm the aptness of Washington Dener dos Santos Cunha’s remark that “the ‘real’ Lisbon, which is rational and regular, a model 18th century city, the pride of the Marquis of Pombal, a man who had a passion for geometrical forms, becomes, from the point of view of Pessoa/Soares, a text in the form of an open pit” (78; my emphasis).
In his essay entitled “Paysages de Fernando Pessoa,” Robert Bréchon points to another form of reciprocity between the greater and the lesser—in this case between the indeterminate space of the natural world and the circumscribed space of the city that it contains—when he describes Soares as a “pedestrian of Lisbon” who observes its “urban landscapes, skies, clouds, river, and scenes of street life” (100; my emphasis). Soares seems to corroborate Bréchon’s metaphor when he says that he would like the city “twice over if I were in the country (378), and, after telling us that he cares for none of the things that are specifically urban or modern about the city—including motor vehicles, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, or radios—he concludes with a rhapsodic tribute to a highly pastoral version of Lisbon:
None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore. I delight in the sky because I see it from the fourth floor on a downtown street. Nothing nature or the country can give me compares with the jagged majesty of the tranquil, moonlit city as seen from Graça or [Sao] Pedro de Alcântara. There are no flowers for me like the variegated colouring of Lisbon on a sunny day. (50; my emphasis)
Whereas in Lisbon, the natural world is restricted to the noteworthy gardens that one finds in various parts of the city, in The Book, it infiltrates the city as a whole, as when Soares remarks that “I hear the city’s first sounds of life rising like flood-waters from that vague place down below, where the streets made by God run this way and that” (358). The sun itself seems to radiate from within Lisbon when he describes the dawn, which “seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if the sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops” (328). Thanks to the principle of reciprocity, the hills that encircle Lisbon suddenly appear within the city when Soares observes the city’s “jagged majesty, to which we may add such images as “the frozen avalanche of overlapping rooftops” (357) and “the city’s uneven, mountainous mass” (68). In Text 83, the flow of the crowd in a downtown square contributes to this effect when it “passes by, changes course, forms pools, divides into streams, converges into brooks” (79).
This alogical blurring of the distinction between the natural world and the city—whereby gardens expand to “become” the city and the encircling hills as well as the distant sun contract to fit within the confines of the city—is paralleled by Soares’s frequent crossings of the boundary between nature and the visual arts. The techniques of painting, for example, which one expects to be confined within the circumscribed space of the painting itself, expand to “contain” the natural world at the same time that nature is described in such a way that it appears to contract to the dimensions of a painting. As Françoise Laye has aptly commented, Soares looks upon Lisbon “like an impressionist painter who never tires of detailing its thousand and one nuances, which are like an immense prism that refracts the various lights of ‘his’ city” (42). It is as though he has—in his own, diffident and unassuming, way—joined the ranks of the Portuguese painters whose “real” paintings are housed in the city’s art museum. We see Soares exercising his own artistry when he describes the impression made by a slowly dissipating fog:
Since early morning and against the solar custom of this bright city, the fog had wrapped a weightless mantle (which the sun slowly gilded) around the rows of houses, the cancelled open spaces, and the shifting heights of land and of buildings. But as the hours advanced towards midday, the gentle mist began to unravel until, with breaths like flapping shadows of veils, it expired altogether. By ten o’clock, the tenuous blueing of the sky was the only evidence that there had been fog (176).
In the fragment that follows this one, the impression created by the approach of autumn leads to a more internalized sensation:
It’s still not autumn, there’s still no yellow of fallen leaves in the air, still none of the damp sadness that marks the weather when it’s on its way to becoming winter. But there is a hint of expected sadness—a sorrow dressed for the journey—in our hazy awareness of colours being smattered, of the wind’s different sound, of that ancient stillness which spreads in the falling night across the ineluctable presence of the universe. (177)
Soares further dissolves the boundary between a natural scene and a painting when, in two fragments in which the real urban details are indicated only by an initial ellipsis, he shifts to an imaginary description of them in painterly terms. In one of these passages, the rooftops of Lisbon, already noted because of their resemblance to avalanches, are then seen from an impressionistic perspective: “ . . . on the frozen avalanche of overlapping rooftops it is a greyish white, damply tarnished by a lifeless brown” (357). In the other, pattern and color once again come to the fore: “ . . . the whole ensemble is staggered in diverse clusters of darkness, outlined on one side by white, and dappled with blue shades of cold nacre” (357).
We notice, too, Soares’s readiness to use the word “landscape” ambiguously to refer both to the surrounding natural world and to a type of painting:
Whatever it was, the entire landscape was cloaked by a hazy uneasiness made of forgetfulness and attenuation . . . It was hard to tell if the sky was filled with clouds or fog. It was all a torpid haze that was coloured here and there, a greyness with just a hint of yellow, except where it had dissolved into a false pink or had bluely stagnated, though this blue may have been the sky showing through rather than another blue overlaying it (318).
In Text 189, Soares similarly describes a rainy day in a way that may lead us to wonder if this is an actual scene or an impressionist painting: “The air is a veiled yellow, like a pale yellow seen through a dirty white. There’s scarcely any yellow in the grey air, but the paleness of the grey has a yellow in its sadness” (166). This painterly metaphor returns in Text 241, entitled “Triangular Dream,” in which his description of a light that “had become extremely sluggish yellow, a yellow that was filthy white” and a scene in which “the distance between things had increased” leads him to conclude that “in the composition of the space itself, a different interrelationship of something like planes had changed and fragmented the way that sounds, lights and colours use space” (208; my emphasis).
Given Pessoa’s fondness for triadic patterns, which we noted in our introduction, it is not surprising that the axiomatic reciprocities between apex and the indeterminate base that proliferate throughout The Book tend to congregate around three specific locales: the office in which he works, the fourth-floor rented room to which he returns in the evening, and the Rua dos Douradores on which both are situated. Thanks to a reversal to which we have become accustomed, Soares’s confinement within a part of Lisbon that was too lacking in distinction to have entered the cicerone’s field of vision gives him access to boundless spaces to which his counterpart in Lisbon had not thought to direct our attention.
Robert Bréchon has aptly noted, in this respect, that the Lisbon of The Book, unlike the city that we find in Pessoa’s guide book, is limited almost exclusively to the part of the city that borders the Tagus River:
After his final return from South Africa in 1905, when he was seventeen, Pessoa never again traveled. He hardly ever left Lisbon; and we could even say that he spent the entire rest of his life—that is to say, the next thirty years—within a rather limited space that can be covered by foot. The Sao Carlos Square, where he was born, and the Saint Louis des Français Hospital, where he died, are scarcely a kilometer from each other. The lower city (la Baixa), where he worked is about three kilometers from the Campo de Ourique, where he lived from 1920 until his death. (“Paysages” 100)
Resorting to a metaphor that is especially appropriate, given that Soares works for a textile company, Bréchon refers to the setting for Pessoa’s own endless perambulations as a “narrow strip of urban fabric.”
The part of this “narrow strip” represented by the Rua dos Douradores becomes even narrower when Soares describes its utter banality:
Yes, I distinctly see—with the clarity of reason when it flashes in the blackness of life and isolates the objects around us that make it up—all that is shoddy, worn-out, neglected and spurious in this street called Douradores which is my entire life: this office that’s sordid down to the marrow of its employees, this monthly rented room where nothing transpires but a dead man’s life, this corner grocery whose owner I know in the way people know each other, these young men at the door of the old tavern, this toilsome uselessness of the unchanging days, these same characters repeating the same old lines, like a drama consisting only of secrecy, and with the scenery turned inside out . . . (165)
In a later passage, he alludes again to the tavern, while adding such additionally unremarkable details as the “piled-up crates” that clutter the street and the “steady sound of the shoemaker’s hammer” (313). At the same time, however, this narrowing of the street on which he lives and works coexists—in obedience to the principle of reversal between the lesser and the greater—with its limitless widening: “But there is also the universe of the Rua Douradores. Here God also grants that the enigma of life knows no bounds . . . The sunsets, to be sure, are somewhere else. But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses below, it’s true, but with stars up above” (382).
Moving indoors to the even more restricted space of his office, Soares finds many opportunities that allow him to create co-presences formed by the reciprocity between enclosed and open spaces. His daydreaming in the midst of his office routine begins with commonplace escapist images which he then extrapolates to ever more indeterminate visions: “My days at the office, where I always do the very same dull and useless work, are punctuated by visions of me escaping, by dreamed remnants of far-away islands, by feasts in the promenades of parks from other eras, by other landscapes, other feelings, another I” (153). At times, it is the window of his office that becomes the apex from which he leaps into the indeterminate: “It’s midday in the deserted office, and I lean out of the balcony windows overlooking the street down below . . . My spirit abandons the material dimension. I investigate with my imagination. The people passing by on the street are always the same ones who passed by a while ago, always a group of floating figures, patches of motion, uncertain voices, things that pass by and never quite happen” (127).
At other times, it is the narrowly focused attention required by his monotonous, routine work that transports him to less bounded spaces: “all of a sudden, across the huge columned sheet of my numerary destiny, the old house of my elderly aunts, shut off from the world, shelters the drowsy ten o’clock tea, and the kerosene lamp of my lost childhood, glowing only on the linen-covered table, blinds me to the sight of Moreira, illuminated by black electricity infinities away from me” (35–6). In one especially poetic moment, the unusual name of a particular fabric provides Soares with a quasi-Proustian experience that remains, nonetheless, firmly anchored in the routine activity that provokes it: “In the very act of entering the name of an unfamiliar cloth, the doors of the Indus and of Samarkand open up, and Persian poetry (which is from yet another place), with its quatrains whose third lines don’t rhyme, is a distant anchor for me in my disquiet. But I make no mistake: I write, I add, and the bookkeeping goes on, performed as usual by an employee of this office” (16).
The restricted space of Soares’s fourth-floor rented room, like the Rua dos Douradores and his office, provides him—thanks to a window that serves as his gateway to the infinite—with boundless perspectives. It is, in effect, his alternative to the “pedestal of glory” on which the statue of the Marquês de Pombal may be observed “contemplating his formidable work” (Lisbon 22) and the hierarchical order that it represents. At times, this window is merely an aperture that opens upon the street, as when he remarks on the “open coolness” of his window” (31), remembers feeling the rain when he opened it (359), or hears on the other side of it “the chance sound of a late-night car” (207). More often, however, it serves as a portal through which Soares brings the restricted space of his room into contact—perhaps even into union—with the infinite. As Washington Dener dos Santos has observed, “The Lisbon of The Book is constructed around the window of Soares’s room from which he conducts a kind of ‘flânerie’” (76). He also suggests—in a metaphor that appropriately combines the aquatic with the labyrinthian—that the window serves as a canal that connects the city itself with Soares’s interior labyrinths. Soares’s window replaces, in effect, the dock along the Tagus from which Alvaro de Campos launches himself in The Maritime Ode upon a nautical journey that, like Soares’s, is an entirely virtual one.
In a metaphor that recalls dos Santos’s observation about its connecting him to his “interior labyrinths,” Soares associates his window with the experience of aimless wandering: “And from the window that looks on to myself I contemplate in awe the deep-red sunsets, the wispy twilights of my sorrows without cause, where the dangers, burdens, and failures of my innate incapacity for existing march by in processions of my aimlessness” (332). A slight shift from window to balcony produces the image of a sea voyage: “Even I am sleeping, although my body is leaning over the balcony as over the rail of a ship sailing past an unfamiliar landscape . . . [a rail] which no one has ever cleaned, unaware that one day, if only for a moment, it would have to serve as a deck rail (where there could logically be no dust) of a ship on an infinite sightseeing cruise” (360).
In his own “remaking” of Lisbon following the earthquake of 1755, the Marquess of Pombal drew his inspiration from the plan devised by Christopher Wren for the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666, but which had been rejected a century earlier by the Londoners themselves because it was such a radical, “modernized” departure from the city that they had known. As Richard Hamblyn has pointed out, Pombal rejected more moderate proposals for the reconstruction of Lisbon “in favour of the more radical raze and rebuild approach, of the kind that Christopher Wren had proposed for London in the wake of the fire, but which had been overruled in favour of preserving existing streets and property lines . . . Lisbon’s rectilinear street plan, which began to be laid out in the early 1760s, owed much of its spatial grammar to the century-old London blueprint” (110; my emphasis).
Pombal himself was in the ideal position of a ruler who did not need anyone’s approval to forge ahead with his own, aggressively modernizing vision of the “new” Lisbon. He was thus able to create out of its ruins (a resonant word in The Book, whose alogical “spatial grammar” closely resembles the one that we find in “The Library of Babel”) left by the earthquake a city in which what had been at the center—its religious and aristocratic institutions—is pushed out to the margins and what had been peripheral—its secular and mercantile activity—was promoted to the center. As John R. Mullin tells us, the six plans that were seriously considered “were created with the intent of furthering Pombal’s goal of creating a city that reflected new values. The city was to reflect a society in which the citizen, the merchant and the bureaucrat took precedence over the crown, church and nobility. The results were indeed a new Lisbon” (157).
We may surmise that Pombal would have agreed with Soares’s assertion that “the only true art is that of construction” (214). With this principle as their common starting point, however, each of them remade Lisbon as a paradise based on equally radical but fundamentally contrasting models. Pombal’s creation of a city whose splendor would be celebrated centuries later by Pessoa’s cicerone—is repeated in a highly original way by Soares, who subjects it to an equally proprietary process of reconstruction, but one that evokes, not the rise of bourgeois rationality—and the creation of new forms of hierarchy—but the emergence of uncanny reciprocities.