Fernando Pessoa opens the doors of his library wide

Objects exhibited in Pessoa's house.jose frade

"Windows of my room, / room of one of the millions in the world that nobody knows who he is / (and if they knew who he is, what would they know?)", He asks himself in the most famous of his poems,

, the naval engineer Álvaro de Campos, heteronym of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

What do the people who look at the windows on the 1st right at number 16 Rua Coelho da Rocha know about him, the Lisbon apartment where Pessoa lived for the last 15 years?

In that building a museum dedicated to the writer has been operating since 1993, which this Saturday has reopened after a year and a half closing due to renovations and in which you can now see how he lived and what the library of the discreet author was like, the architect himself of all a literature but of whose life relatively little is known.

• Pessoa as cultural ambassador of Portugal

The poet's house-museum has built a full-scale plan of the apartment that Pessoa arrived in with his mother and brothers in 1920 and where he lived alone for several periods until his death in 1935 at age 47 due to ailments related to his hobby. alcohol.

In a tiny interior room that barely fits a cot and a trunk like the one that contained the 25,000 unpublished pages left by the author, Pessoa settled in the first years.

In one of the outer rooms, which is likely to have been changed in one of the stages in which he was without his family, the tall chest of which he speaks in a letter is now exposed in which he tells how Alberto Caeiro was born, a of his three main heteronyms together with Campos and Ricardo Reis ("he is not a philosopher: he is a wise man", says Octavio Paz, one of the great enthusiasts of the work of the Portuguese in the Hispanic world; "futurist poet", " cosmopolitan ”and“ vagabond dandy ”, defines the second,“ pagan and skeptic by conviction, Latinist by education ”, outlines about Reis).

Next to it is the study, in which the museum exhibits the sheet with the last sentence that the author wrote: "

" ("I don't know what tomorrow will bring").

One floor below, visitors will be able to find the great novelty of the house, around 1,200 original volumes in Spanish, Galician, French, Greek, Italian, Latin, Portuguese and, above all, English of the more than 1,300 that made up the library author's staff when he died.

Diving a bit between the spines of the volumes, one arrives at five of an anthology of classical Greek literature translated into English, one of which comes from the epigram of Paladas de Alejandría - "Today let me live well;

no one knows what tomorrow may be ”- which inspired the poet's last sentence, according to the catalog

.

The Portuguese highlights it in its 1916 edition, as can be seen in the digitized version of the works available on the museum's website, access to which the institution has facilitated on a screen installed on one side of the room.

Although the books cannot be flipped through, the experience of shamelessly poking around the library of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century is priceless.

Among the four rows of books, two paperback editions stand out: an anthology of copper covers by Walt Whitman published in 1895 (says Harold Bloom in 'The Western Canon': “Pessoa was not crazy nor was he a simple ironist; he is Walt Whitman revived , although a Whitman who gives different names to

,

and

and writes wonderful books of poems for all three, as well as a different volume under the name of Walt Whitman ”) and a 1910 copy of the

by Omar Jayam in Edward FitzGerald's famous English translation, the most annotated volume in the Pessoan library.

The writer learned about the quartets in an essay on Persian poetry by Emerson (included in

a volume bound in faded red cloth and gold letters from 1902 also on display in the museum), according to an essay by the expert Fabrizio Boscaglia.

Pessoa translated 42 poems from the book for an anthology that he tried unsuccessfully to publish and wrote 172 quartets under the influence of Jayam-FitzGerald (most included in a bilingual edition published in 2015 by Gallo de Oro).

"Omar Jayam was, not the author, but FitzGerald's inspiration," wrote the Portuguese in his copy of the

, where he also confessed: "I translated them, as FitzGerald had translated them, with just and probable improbity."

Pessoa had around twenty books in Spanish, the majority minor or reference works, with very striking absences such as Don Quixote and the Spanish Golden Age (although he had the

of Quevedo and

, compiled by Menéndez y Pelayo, according to the researchers Jerónimo Pizarro, António Cardiello and Patricio Ferrari).

Instead he had the complete works of Rosalía de Castro in Galician and a Madrid edition

of Gogol's

story

(according to Pizarro, the Portuguese also read

Nietzsche's

in Spanish).

Another of the works published in Spain,

, by the Valencian Luis Morote, is highlighted on the first floor of the museum, in the section dedicated to heteronyms.

It is part of the group of 25 books signed by Alexander Search, one of Pessoa's first unfolding.

In the same room you can see the iconic portrait of the poet that José de Almada Negreiros painted - an angular and slender Pessoa who looks into the void sitting at a table in the dark corner of a cafe - the sketches of the three heteronyms that Negreiros himself carved on a mural along with other literary figures on the portico of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, as well as a typewriter that Pessoa used in one of the many offices where he worked as a

commercial translator

- located, by the way, one street from Rua dos Douradores, the vital center of the accounting assistant Bernardo Soares, to whom Pessoa awards the second part of his magnum opus, the

-.

Pessoa not only worked in the same neighborhood as his semi-heteronym (he called it that in a letter), he also had in his library one of his favorite books, the

by Father Francisco José Freire.

Soares says in Restlessness that he slept with that book at the head of his bed.

Leaning out of the window of the apartment where Pessoa lived, museum visitors still have the opportunity to play with the idea that they are seeing something similar to what Soares saw one rainy morning in 1929 when it was difficult for him to get up: “I woke up .

The sound of the rain stands out louder in the undefined exterior.

I feel happier.

I fulfilled something that I do not know.

I get up, go to the window, open the doors with a decision of great courage.

Light on a day of clear rain that drowns my eyes in a pale light.

I open the glass windows themselves.

The cool air moistens my warm skin.

It rains, yes, but even if it is the same it is in the end so much less!

I want to refresh myself, to live, and I bend my neck to life, I extend it out the window as if towards the abstract yoke of God ”.