A stroll through Lisbon by Fernando Pessoa's side

If there is something that never ceases to amaze me about Lisbon, it is its light. Those blue skies melt into the Tagus and illuminate the elegant decadence of the city's tiled facades, churches, and rooftops. This time, I have come to meet Fernando Pessoa again and, although it seems obvious, our first meeting point has to be early in the morning, at the emblematic Café A Brasileira, drinking "uma bica", the short, black coffee that tastes like nowhere else in the world.

There, in the intricate and nostalgic neighborhood of "El Chiado", Pessoa comes punctually to his appointment every morning and I find him sitting on the terrace of the cafe, in a chair, with his legs crossed, his mustache groomed, his glasses, and his inseparable hat.

After the coffee, I let myself go, walking by his side through the nostalgic and melancholic air that flows through many of the old streets, what I think is one of the greatest characteristics of Lisbon, that is so easy to fall in love with. The narrow and lonely streets alternate with the bustle of other more populated squares until we reach the open-sky ruins of the Convento do Carmo, Lisbon's most important Gothic temple that was semi-destroyed during the tragic earthquake of 1755 that devastated the city.

Even so, the columns and flying buttresses that now frame the clouds and the blue Lisbon sky still convey all the majesty that this temple once had.

Pessoa explained to me that he was born on the fourth floor of number 4 Largo de São Carlos on June 13, 1888. Soon after, the untimely death of his father caused his mother to remarry the Portuguese consul in Durban (South Africa). Thus, at the age of 7, little Fernando and his family settled in Durban where he received a British education until he returned alone to Lisbon in 1905, at the age of 17, and never again would he travel or practically leave his city. His English education allowed him to devote his entire life to alternating his work as a writer with that of a translator of commercial correspondence.

I asked him about this almost aversion to leaving Lisbon and, in the words of his heteronym Soares and using his particular play with language, he answered: "I have already seen everything I have never seen and I have already seen everything I have not yet seen".

We continue walking until we reach one of his favorite city streets where he brought that heteronym to life, Bernardo Soares. We are in the Rua dos Douradores, a narrow street that still today goes unnoticed by many tourists and is located in La Baixa.

In the early twentieth century, this neighborhood was populated by lottery stores, warehouses, offices, grocery stores, pensions, eating houses, and confectioneries. It was one of the liveliest and busiest areas of the city. Such was Pessoa's love for this street that, through Soares, he wrote in one of his novels: "I will always be from Rua dos Douradores, like the whole of humanity".

One of Pessoa's great passions, apart from writing, was astrology. Lisbon became the great little microcosm of this author who believed it was unnecessary to travel to know the world. A lover of heteronyms (different poetic identities that he created with other names and to which he gave his own personality and life and even his own astrological chart), he wrote dozens of books, poems, and articles signed by them. These heteronyms, a concept that goes far beyond the simple pseudonym, allowed Pessoa to express his ideas about different subjects, hidden behind other identities that no one else knew. The most popular were Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Bernardo Soares.

Fernando Pessoa, who said that the Tagus seemed to him "all the oceans of the world", lived in numerous places in the city, although the last one was the one he spent the most years in. Today, in Rua Coelho da Rocha, number 16, you can visit the House Museum of Fernando Pessoa (where he lived between 1920 and his death in 1935) and enter his small and austere room, inhabited by a bed, a library, a chest of drawers with his typewriter, and a trunk full of manuscripts, astrological charts, and astrology notes.

It is estimated that he wrote more than 300 astrological charts and other astrological documents throughout his life, which ended prematurely at age 47 because of a hepatic colic probably associated with cirrhosis caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

I say goodbye to Pessoa in the Jerónimos Monastery in Belem, where his body was transferred in 1988 in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. There he rests, in that inescapable journey to the afterlife, next to the navigator Vasco da Gama and the poet Luís de Camões.

From there with his British sense of humor, he ends up confessing to me that it seems to him almost a joke of fate that his last home is a monument that symbolizes, along with the Tower of Belém and the Monument to the Discoveries, the Golden Age of Portuguese explorations.