In Portugal, I took pictures in the bookshop - of the covers of Lispector volumes, for a start, with her made-up aqualine face, very striking, and then of the recommended section, with Broch and Musil there, and plenty of Pessoa (the Pessoa museum, by the way, was a tremendous disappointment), and then, as I passed, of the readers' room, long and narrow, and completely full of book browsers sitting in two long rows with their prizes. But then I got told off by a shop assistant, first of all in indignant Portuguese, and then, when I said I couldn't understand, in English. No pictures were to be taken unless I asked the security guard's permission. I felt rueful. I couldn't take pictures? Why not?
The Portuguese are booklovers, I could tell that. Books are expensive there. I rather wanted an original Livre du Dissassego. I saw one in a pavement store. How much? 24 Euro! 24 Euro! But in the bookshops - and it was only a paperback - it cost 36. Madness. No original for me. In the flat, I read parts of Zenith's Penguin Book of Disquiet. I don't own a copy - it wasn't mine. I like my Quartet Encounters edition more, underlined and annotated as it is. It bears the marks of my reading (and rereading). At one time, it was an essential book for me. Reading it now, with the Bridge of 25th April visible from the 6th floor, I remembered that first flush of readings. How old was I then? 22, I thought, or 23. Terrible years, and in which my taste in reading changed altogether. The Book was at the heart of it, I remembered. Everyting turned around the Book (but weren't there other books, too - Kierkegaard, for example? Stages on Life's Way? Guilty/ Not Guilty?)
I was in Pessoa's Lisbon, had had my photograph taken next to his sculpture in the cafe, and hadn't I bought a Pessoa teeshirt (too small, alas, though it was marked 'L'. A child's size, I said, giving it to my Beloved)? Pessoa! I wondered whether the name was for me only an index of a time when reading was essential, when it was at the heart of things. Zenith's edition seemed as cool as our air-conditioned bedroom. Black covers. Many, many pages, with numbered sections. Appendices in which I would wander for hours. And a fine introduction, too, from this most admirable of Pessoa scholars. But I remembered by Quartet edition, and finding it in Manchester, in Waterstones, and reading it puzzedly, then compulsively, over and over again. The Book of Disquiet, which fell, engimatic stone, into the heart of my reading, drawing everything around it.
The Pessoa museum, as I said, was insignificant; there was nothing there. Happily, we had had a marvellous lunch in a nearby cafe - marvellous because we ate alongside office workers and ladies-who-lunch, their hair solid with hairspray, because we ate from a small menu almost identical to that of every other cafe - marvellous because it was any-cafe-whatever. We were already content, slightly drunk from the wine, well fed - fish, marvellous fish. These long lunch hours! These three hours stretched like a hammock from the poles of morning and evening!: the Portuguese knew how to live, we thought. They ate and drank a full meal at lunchtime. They met and ate and talked and drank and all of this on Pessoa's street, on the street where he lived in his last years, when he wrote so much of his book.
On the way back to our apartment, we stopped for several hours in a park, and I looked through my photographs. Lispector! And a whole display of Pessoa's books! What they meant to me! Or rather, what they had meant - what they meant then such that they could mean anything now, such that what reached me on the pages of a borrowed Penguin Disquiet still glowed from an older, higher reading! I was nearer the Source, I thought. Higher up, by the mountain streams, where Literature began and still begins. Why then, why there? Because of the misery of those years when my reading changed, when it changed direction - when, for all the reading I did before, what I read took on the shape of my life. Who would I be? Didn't I learn of it then, aged 22, aged 23 ...?
I was an office worker, of course. No long lunch hours dangled across the day. Work and more work - data entry, filing. What was Pessoa in all this? The opposite of 'all this', but whereas Bernardo Soares was imaginable in Lisbon, he was not so in Bracknell, or in Winnersh Triangle. The Book was the opposite of that world, as it might still belong in Lisbon. The opposite, and this is why Literature with a capital 'L', and I should say Modernism, was never a part of our lives ('our' because there were other readers, scattered around). Never part of it, away from it, impossibly far, but for all that, impossibly important.
Everything I read since then has been a reading of Pessoa. Everything that search for a kind of hammock in the day - not for reading, but for living of a type that was not allowed anymore. Pessoa lived on a street near the cafe. He belonged there; even Bernardo Soares had his two feet on the ground in Lisbon; he was no ghost: that's what I tell myself this morning, however foolishly. Or he was a ghost who still belonged to a place, haunting it to show that another life was possible, that you might live in another way. But here, now? No ghosts, no possibilities; no high place to reach by way of reading.
