Weather Permitting

So now that I'm back in Lisbon and digging Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I've set myself up for some high reckoning: imagining Saramago imagining Reis--a character, or heteronym imagined by Fernando Pessoa eighty or ninety years ago--imagining Pessoa himself, also a character in this novel.  What we all have in common, if I may even for moment claim something in common with these figures, is that we're all in Lisbon, walking the streets, always an up and down proposition in this "city of seven hills".  In the pensao I checked into this afternoon, buying five days at a discounted rate, I carefully unpacked my bag in the manner of Saramago's Reis, a precise, formal man and a poet who writes precise, formal poems

Starting tomorrow morning after breakfast, I'll sit out here, 3rd floor, looking south to the Rio Tejo.  Pessoa rarely left Lisbon.  Reis just returned after 16 years in Brazil.  Don't know about Saramgo, but his novels are full of, among much else, close attention to this place.