The Shadows of Lisbon : Meeting Fernando Pessoa
I don’t remember where I met him. Not at A Brasileira, that much I know. Perhaps a side street in Mártires, perhaps a smoke-filled room near Sacramentos. Places blur when someone has come to matter. Time too. Were we twenty, thirty, forty ? I can’t retrieve the label. I know only that Fernando took his place in my life as if it had been waiting for him, and that I followed him, with my scribbler’s air, convinced that melancholy was a kind of passage.
Lisbon I see again in steep slopes, in jasmine trailing through the evenings, and in that slightly sour white wine that kept us company. We walked a great deal. Long stretches without speaking, except to decide on a glass, a counter, a patch of shade when the light grew too hard.
Fernando worked at the port : translations for freight forwarders, nothing glorious, but he held to it with a kind of poor elegance. Dark hat, cheap glasses, thin mustache, elbows worn shiny with use. He arrived in late afternoon, measured steps, as if not wanting to disturb the pavement. He had that slight smile that never quite opens. His gravity sometimes made me laugh inwardly, it seemed so mismatched with the life shouting around us, but I held back ; then we’d go drink, and watch the neighborhood stir without joining in.
He spoke little. When he let slip the name of some unknown city, it was like a match in the dark. One day I understood he’d grown up in Durban, because of his clean English, without accent, and a way of pronouncing certain words as if they came back to him from far off. He carried a constant melancholy, not the spectacular kind : something that veiled his gaze behind the lenses, even when he simply seemed tired. Always discreet, always exact.
He wrote, of course. Otherwise, what was the point of such fidelity ? On evenings when we’d gone too far already, he’d read me his poems first in Portuguese, for the music, then translate in his way, half French, half English, searching for the exact point. I understood the language poorly, but I heard the material : the dry consonants, the wet vowels, the line held without emphasis, spoken in an almost cold voice.
I still hear him sometimes, long after, in his hesitant French : "To sail is precious, to live is not precious."