Lisbon, June 2016: A Brief, Very Personal History of Portuguese Literature in Three Mind Paintings

Abstract

Lisbon, June 2016:A Brief, Very Personal History of Portuguese Literature in Three Mind Paintings Peter LaSalle (bio) 1. Pensão Brasil-África I've been in Lisbon for a few days. And now I am stretched out on the bed, still dressed and reading from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, nine at night. Then maybe I just place the book beside me on the made bed. I doze off, to awake an hour or so later, having slipped into an easy dream, soon dissolving. Alone, I am staying in the Pensão Brasil-África. ________ A modest but quite homey place on a short side street, the Brasil-África occupies the top floor of an old apartment building. It has an ornate blue-and-white tile facade and iron-railed balconies rife with well-watered geraniums. I like how the location is central, a few blocks away from the entirely regal esplanade of the Praça do Comércio, which opens up to a fine panorama of the wide River Tagus. Waking, it takes me a little time to get oriented, realize exactly where I am. I suppose I know that one of the small pleasures of travel is to wake in a room in an unfamiliar place, almost still in the dream you were having (was it something about Marion—or I'll call her that here—a woman from Baton Rouge who I sometimes wonder if maybe I should have married when young; we'd met as students at a summer writers' conference to which I'd received a scholarship; I remember we joked, laughingly back then, agreeing that with romance so rampant among attendees, most any writers' conference, such as ours in the rolling green hills of Vermont, probably had more to do with just that—romance, all but scenarios from the old TV show The Love Boat—than what normally constitutes writing-workshop instruction), yes, there is a feeling half jarring but half soothing as well, to coming out of sleep that way with a sense of disorientation, even a soft lostness, looking around, asking yourself where in the world you are . . . until you do, in fact, recognize enough of the surroundings to return once more to what commonly passes for the here and now. I slowly pivot and sit up on the bed's edge in the spacious, high-ceilinged room. [End Page 131] I look around some more. There's a single lamp on the night table, glowing, a glossy orange porcelain base and conical parchment shade; there are the bedspread's bright pastel stripes, the cracked yellow walls and the brown linoleum floor, the heavy Portuguese furniture, such dark wood for the huge armoire and the vanity/desk with its clouded mirror, a couple of intricately carved, straight-backed chairs to match. There are the long gauzy curtains on either side of the open French doors that give way to a balcony here on the top floor, the fourth, as reached by winding wooden stairs, creaky. And fully awake now, I do know for certain where I, well, am. I'm wearing old khakis and a long-sleeve dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the collar open, my usual travel attire. Sweating a bit in the warmth, I think of Marion from Baton Rouge some more, wondering why she chose this time and place to turn up in a dream when I hadn't thought of her for so long. I stare at the paperback that I'd let drop beside me when I dozed off, a copy of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet; it's more or less the reason why I am here in Lisbon for these two weeks, rereading and thinking about the work of Pessoa, others in Portuguese literature, too. I've been doing a lot of this kind of travel lately, going to a place where literature I love is set, immersing myself in the world of the words of the other country for a while. And this time it is, very much so, Pessoa, the great modernist poet of twentieth-century Portuguese literature. He died in 1935 at age...