| Summary: | This paper explores the strikingly different representations of Pessoa’s
native city offered by the lordly cicerone of Pessoa’s guidebook Lisbon: What Every
Tourist Should See and the lowly assistant bookkeeper of his modernist masterpiece,
The Book of Disquiet. For the cicerone, Lisbon is a magnificent imperial city whose
treasures vie with those of other European capitals; for the bookkeeper, it is a
neighborhood limited almost exclusively to the Rua dos Douradores, the drab,
somewhat louche street where he lives and works. The tedium of his daily life is never
relieved by the inspiring sight of a magnificent historical monument or an impressive
public square. In place of such touristic attractions, we find frequent mention of such
utterly worthless places as the office in which he works, the restaurant in which he
meets the stranger, the tavern across the street, the fourth-floor rented room from
whose window he gazes, and the barbershop in which he learns of the barber’s death.
Despite these differences, however, both Lisbon and The Book fulfill – each in its own
distinctive way – the aspiration to which Soares gives voice when he wishes that
“there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me.” As I shall
demonstrate here, the cicerone presents Lisbon as a beautiful paradise, made of
magnificent things that one need only see in order to admire, while for the bookkeeper
it is a rather dismal place that will, however, be rendered sublime by the immense
poetic
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