Circunda-te de [livros], ama, bebe, e cala. O mais é nada

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The other day I got an email that, to borrow a favorite phrase of Manuel Antônio de Almeida, made me . A series of talks on Fernando Pessoa this month in the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, starting on October 3rd! Who has two thumbs, no class on Mondays, and errands to run in Centro?  This kid. (The one failing of the written word: you can’t see when I’m pointing at myself. You’ll just have to take my word for it.) This Monday found me practically skipping over to Rua Luis de Camões, only to be comically halted in my tracks by the sight of the vast Uruguaiana book fair. At least 5 blocks of book stands, all piled high with dusty and dirt-cheap books. PROMOÇÃO, screamed the handmade signs, and I came running.

Wherever books are incredibly cheap, you can bet on finding an amazing amount of crap, everything from Danielle Steel to the Brazilian Danielle Steel and beyond. To paraphrase Macbeth to the point of incomprehension – yet who would have thought the world to have so many bad books in it? At the Uruguaiana book fair there were bad books, there were ugly books, and then there were just tragically misplaced books: a German-language translation of Graham Greene, a thin volume on the Paraguayan political system, a tome on swine nutrition.

These books might not be bad per se, but they’re either massively out of place – gone astray from the country where someone might actually buy them – or just so incredibly specific that there is probably only one person in Brazil who really, really wants them. I amused myself by imagining the desperate swineherd wandering down Uruguaiana whose face would suddenly light up as he spotted the book’s spine. “Finally!” he’d cry, handing over R$3 with tears of joy welling up in his eyes. I propped up the book to make it a bit more visible, just in case. In a remarkable display of self-control, I walked away hefting only a collection of García Lorca poems, another of Eça de Queiroz’s stories, and another copy of A Hora da Estrela because, hey, it was R$5. But I know I’ll be back, and probably manage to spend a good chunk of whatever remains of my savings.

When I got to the Real Gabinete, I had the distinct pleasure of being escorted upstairs for a change, into a plush auditorium on the second floor. The place was just a bit too pompously decorated – arched windows running along the wall facing the street, gilt crawling up from the wainscot in various permutations of fleurs-de-lis and the ceiling lined with the escutcheons of grand Portuguese families. If the place were a book, it would be a plump nostalgic edition bound in faux red leather, gathering dust on a sebo shelf. Translation: I liked it.

There were about 20 people in attendance at the start of the talk, and the crowd slowly swelled throughout the hour and a half that followed. Who were they, these Pessoa aficionados with nothing to do on a Monday afternoon? The crowd was overwhelmingly female, mainly middle-aged women with a few backpack-clutching youths like myself. Come to see Antônio Cícero, of course, give a talk titled Fernando Pessoa: muitos e nenhum. I’d seen him once before, interviewing José Miguel Wisnik at Oi Futuro Flamengo. The availability of a certain caliber of Brazilian intellectual continues to astonish me. First of all, I can’t believe that these people who I watched from afar (Cícero having appeared in Pan-Cinema Permanente) actually exist; secondly, I can’t believe that I get to see them. Enfim, I blinked away the stars in my eyes as the RGPL director introduced the poet and he launched into the talk.

Cícero laid out what he saw as the cisão da subjetividade, the modern fragmentation of identity that permits a division between the self and the perceived self – that which, enfim, makes Pessoa “many and none” at the same time. His argument was long and intricate, ranging from Homer to Bernardo Soares and poem to poem; and I adored it.  But since my notes are all scribbly and the blogosphere generally does not look kindly on long-winded literary criticism, I’ll spend the last wisps of my blog-breath describing the true charm of the talk: Cícero’s delivery. The glee with which he read lines of “Tabacaria” and fragments of the Book of Disquiet, almost with an air of awe at the words leaving his mouth, knees bouncing under the table – it was utterly, utterly contagious, and you could feel the entire room being carried away on Pessoa’s words. This is teaching, I wrote in my notebook, and then underlined it three times.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo