Rua dos Douradores

                    Ulysses, Ulisspo, Lisboa. I wrote the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon inquiring about the 21 Poems of Alvaro de Campos. My copy, acquired on a trip there in ‘97, had been lost in the fire that gutted our house—and all my books. I don't remember having actually read it. It was a pleasure simply to own it: a thin volume of long, languid free verse sitting snug on the shelf between Pessoa's other heteronyms: Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Pessoa himself (or was he?). Its cover was made of corrugated cardboard stock, the kind shipping boxes are made of, with a hole in front exposing the number 21 on the title page; the paper had a faux-faded yellow tint; the typeset was the slender sans serif of an old Olympia. I was told it was out of print.

                    I remember confounding the lady at the museum shop when I asked for directions to Rua dos Douradores. She thought I was looking for a street paved in gold (ouro) as she took out her map. It felt silly telling her I was in Lisbon looking for a common street, where, from the fourth floor of a building, one Bernardo Soares, another Pessoa alter ego, surveyed the entire world. 

And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, the fourth-floor room where I live represents Art for me. Yes, Art, residing at the very same street as Life, but in a different place. Yes for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles... (The Book of Disquiet)

                    That Pessoa should choose such a nondescript place as the mise en scène for the “factless autobiography” of a bookkeeper in Lisbon is no accident. He meant to rub in life's defeat, like Campos who declares he is nothing and can't possibly be anything, and then further thwarts himself by admitting: “but I have in me all the dreams of the world.”

                    Perhaps it is fitting that Rua dos Douradores remains in obscurity, that even the staff at Casa Fernando Pessoa have trouble finding it in their maps, and fitting for me to wander this city after “the man of twists and turns” vainly looking for it.