I took the Lusitania Express at midnight. I carried with me only a small suitcase with the bare necessities, and asked the concierge to hold my room for two days. The station was almost deserted at that hour. I had not reserved a couchette, and the conductor assigned me a compartment at the end of the train where there was one other passenger, a corpulent man who snored. I prepared myself with resignation for a night of insomnia, but contrary to my expectation I slept soundly until the outskirts of Talavera de la Reina. Then I lay motionless, awake, looking out the dark window at the dark desert of the Estremadura. I had many hours to think about Maria do Carmo.
“Saudade,” said Maria do Carmo, “yearning. It isn’t a word, it’s a category of the spirit. Only the Portuguese are able to feel it, because they have this word in order to say that they have it. A great poet said this.” And then she began to talk about Fernando Pessoa. I called for her at her home in Rua das Chagas about six o’clock in the afternoon. She was waiting for me behind a window. When she saw me enter Largo Camñes, she opened the heavy front door and we went down toward the harbor, wandering through Rua dos Fanqueiros and Rua dos Douradores. “Let’s take a Fernandian itinerary,” she said. “These were the favorite places of Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper — semi-heteronomous by definition — for the city of Lisbon. It was here that he practiced his metaphysics, in this barber shop.”
At that hour the Baixa, the lower part of the city, was crowded with hurrying, shouting people. The offices of the navigation companies and the commercial businesses were closing their doors. At the tram stops there were long lines. You could hear the propagandizing cry of the shoeshine boys and the newspaper sellers. In the confusion we slipped into Rua da Prata, crossed Rua da Conceição, and went down toward the Terreiro do Paço, white and sad, where the first ferries crowded with commuters were sailing for the opposite bank of the Tagus. “This is really an Álvaro de Campos zone,” said Maria do Carmo. “In a few streets we’ve passed from one heteronomous to the other.’’
At that hour the light of Lisbon was white toward the mouth of the river and pink on the hills, the eighteenth-century buildings looked like an oleograph, and the Tagus was furrowed by a myriad of boats. We went on toward the first quays, those quays where Álvaro de Campos went to wait for no one, as Maria do Carmo said, and she recited some verse from the Ode Marittima, the passage in which the shape of the little steamer is outlined on the horizon and Campos feels a flywheel begin to revolve in his breast.
Dusk was falling on the city, the first lights were lit, the Tagus glistened with iridescent reflections. In Maria do Carmo’s eyes there was a great sadness. “Maybe you’re too young to understand — at your age I wouldn’t have understood, I wouldn’t have imagined that life was like a game that I used to play when I was a little girl in Buenos Aires. Pessoa is a genius because he understood the reversal of real and imagined things. His poetry is a juego del revés, a backwards game.”
The train stopped. From the window the lights of the border town could be seen. My traveling companion had the surprised, uneasy look of one who has suddenly been awakened by the light. The policeman carefully turned the pages of my passport. “You come to our country often,” he said. “What do you find so interesting here?” “Baroque poetry,” I answered: “What did you say?” he murmured. “A lady,” I said. “A lady with a strange name — Violante do Céu.” “Is she beautiful?’’ he inquired archly. “Maybe,’’ I said. “She’s been dead for three centuries and she always lived in a convent. She was a nun.” He shook his head and smoothed his mustache with a mischievous air, stamped my visa, and handed me my passport. “You Italians always love to joke,” he said. “Do you like Totò?” “Very much,” I said, “and do you?” “I’ve seen all his films,” he said. “I like Alberto Sordi better.”
Our compartment was the last to be checked. The door was closed with a thud. After a few seconds someone on the platform waved a lantern and the train began to move. The lights went out again. Only the pale blue lamp remained. It was the middle of the night. I was entering Portugal as I had many other times in my life. Maria do Carmo was dead. I felt a strange sensation, as if from on high I were watching another me who, one July night, inside a compartment of a semi-dark train, was entering a foreign country in order to go to see a woman whom he knew well and who was dead. It was a sensation that I had never fell before and it made me think that it had something to do with the backwards-ness.
“The game was like this,” said Maria do Carmo. “We made a circle — four or five children — we counted off, and the child whose turn it was went into the middle. He chose anyone he wanted and tossed him a word, any word at all—mariposa, for example. And that child had to pronounce it backwards immediately, but without thinking it over, because the other one was counting — one, two, three, four, five — and at five he won. But if you were able to say asopiram in time, then you were the winner of the game, you went into the middle of the circle and tossed your word at whomever you wanted.”
Climbing toward the city, Maria do Carmo told me about her Buenos Aires childhood as a daughter of exiles. I imagined a courtyard on the outskirts of the city, populated by children, sad, impoverished holidays. “It was full of Italians,” she said. “My father had an old horn-type gramophone and he had brought some fado records with him from Portugal. It was 1939. The radio said that Franco’s forces had taken Madrid. He cried and put on the records. In his last months I remember him like this, in pajamas in his armchair, crying in silence, listening to the fados of Hilário and of Tomás Alcaide. I would escape to the courtyard and play the juego del revés.”
Night had fallen. The Terreiro do Papo was almost deserted. The bronze horseman, green from the salty air, seemed absurd. “Let’s go to Alfama for something to eat,” said Maria do Carmo. “Arroz de cabidela, for instance. It’s a Sephardic dish. The Jews don’t tear the neck off the hen, they cut off the head, and they make the rice with the blood. I know a tavern where they make it like no other place. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
A yellow tram passed, slowly, rattling, full of tired faces. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Why did I marry my husband? Why do I live in that absurd palace? Why am I here playing at being a countess? When he arrived in Buenos Aires he was a courteous, elegant officer, I was a poor, sad young girl. From my window all I could see was that courtyard. And he took me away from that grayness, from a house with dim lights and the radio turned on at supper time. In spite of everything, I can’t leave him. I can’t forget.”
My traveling companion asked if he could have the pleasure of inviting me for coffee. He was a jovial, ceremonious Spaniard who frequently traveled that line. In the dining car we talked amiably, exchanging detailed and formal impressions of the many places we had in common. “The Portuguese have good coffee,” he said, “but this doesn’t help them much, so it seems. They’re so melancholy. They lack charm, don’t you think so?” I told him that maybe they had substituted saudade for charm. He agreed, but preferred charm. “There’s only one life,” he said. “You have to know how to live, dear sir.” I didn’t ask how he managed this himself, and we talked of something else — sports, I think. He adored skiing, the mountains. Portugal was really unliveable from this point of view. I objected that there were mountains there, too. “Oh, the Serra da Estrela!” he exclaimed. “It’s an imitation of a mountain. In order to get to two thousand meters you have to put up an antenna.” “It’s a maritime country,” I said, “a country of people who leap into the ocean. They’ve given the world urbane, dignified madmen, anti-abolitionists, and poets ill with homesickness.” “By the way,” he asked, “what’s the name of that poet you mentioned tonight?” “Soror Violante do Ceu,” I said. “Her name is splendid in Spanish, too — Madre Violante del Cielo. She was a great Baroque poetess. She spent her life sublimating her desire for a world which she had renounced.” “Is she better than Gongora?” he asked with a certain absent-mindedness. “Different,” I said, “with less charm and more saudade, naturally.”