Reading about the life of Fernando Pessoa, we might be tempted to believe he was a solitary soul, a man without friends. In a way, that was true. From childhood, he spent much of his time alone and often preferred the company of imagined companions. With them, he created projects and games—writing poetry, even hand-producing little newsletters to share with family and anyone willing to read them.
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He was well regarded by students and teachers alike, yet there remained something set apart about him—a quiet distance, a self-contained world.

Fernando was deeply attached to his family. The loss of his father to tuberculosis when he was only four, followed by the death of his younger brother just months later, must have marked him profoundly. Still, he remained close to his mother.

Not long after, she remarried—a kind man she met on a streetcar—and moved to Durban, South Africa, where he had been appointed consul. For Fernando, this departure was a rupture. He followed later, accompanied by a beloved uncle, and spent his formative years in Durban with his mother, stepfather, and their growing family.

By all accounts, he adapted well and maintained good relationships there. After his stepfather’s death, he returned to Lisbon, once again among extended family—sisters, aunts, uncles—who remained important presences in his life. His nieces and nephews, in particular, delighted in his playful humor.

His adult relationships were few but meaningful. The most significant was his friendship with Mário de Sá-Carneiro, whose early death by suicide left a lasting wound. There was also his tender, largely platonic love for Ofélia Queiroz—a relationship he ultimately ended, believing it incompatible with his vocation as a poet.

One might even say that Álvaro de Campos, his most forceful heteronym, intervened—declaring such a life could not be sustained.
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Yet the connection lingered. After Pessoa’s death, Ofélia married, but she would later say that he was the only man she ever truly loved. She once told friends that the first time she saw him, he seemed to be walking on air.

Pessoa’s social life did not follow conventional patterns. He worked as a translator and correspondent in business offices, getting along well with colleagues, but not forming deep social bonds there. Instead, he gathered with writers and artists, contributing to projects such as the journal Orpheu.

They met in Lisbon cafés like A Brasileira and Martinho da Arcada. Those who knew him described him as soft-spoken and reserved, yet when he spoke, he was often uncannily precise—almost always right.

His biographer, Richard Zenith, writes that what astonishes us is Pessoa’s ability to live so much of his emotional and mental life on an imagined, literary plane—to “depersonalize” his inner world into multiple selves.
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In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes:
“I’m the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.”

In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago imagines conversations between Pessoa—now dead—and his heteronym Ricardo Reis.

They stroll through Lisbon, speaking as friends might, often pausing at the Miradouro de Santa Catarina beneath the looming figure of Adamastor. No one else sees Pessoa. Only his shadow appears to others.

Still, the conversations continue—measured, thoughtful, companionable.

So perhaps Pessoa was not without friends. They were simply not always visible to the passerby.

I imagine his walks were not so different from my own: a weaving of observation, reflection, memory, and imagined futures. The more I try to know the “real” Pessoa, the more elusive he becomes.

Even Zenith’s remarkable biography reveals only one version--his Pessoa.

We each carry our own.

And I am content to walk beside him in my mind…
sometimes in Lisbon, sometimes far from it.

Friendship has many ways of revealing itself.
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Loyalty is one.
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A few years ago, while visiting the small town of Samois-sur-Seine, I found myself walking along a quiet path at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. The forest floor surprised me—rocky, yet almost perfectly flat—and tall trees rose around me in the deep stillness that only old forests seem to possess.

Then a group of hikers appeared along the trail. They moved easily together, all carrying slender hiking poles. They did not appear to need them for support. They simply walked happily along the path, stylish in their hiking attire, poles swinging rhythmically as they went.

The image stayed with me.

I had come to Samois-sur-Seine because it was the last home of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Over the years my life in Puerto Vallarta has been deeply connected to music and musicians, so making this small pilgrimage to the resting place of one of jazz’s most original voices felt quietly meaningful.

The town rests between the waters of the Seine River and the wide green expanse of the forest. Django and several members of his family are buried there, and visitors still come to pay their respects.

One afternoon I decided to walk to the edge of town and continue out into the forest. It was there, along one of the quiet paths beneath the tall trees, that I encountered the hikers with their poles.

At the time, they were simply an interesting sight along the trail.

Years later, after a few injuries left me feeling less steady than I once had been, I remembered them.

That memory eventually led me to order a pair of walking poles of my own.

I discovered that they are not only helpful but rather stylish as well. And so on my upcoming trip to Puerto Vallarta, where I hope to do as much walking as I comfortably can, the poles will be coming with me.

To begin, I will choose flat surfaces. The long curve of the Malecón (Puerto Vallarta) seems perfect. As I walk, the broad waters of Banderas Bay will stretch beside me.

In my travels through Europe I have also noticed many people using these poles on cobblestones and uneven streets. They provide a quiet sense of stability, something that becomes more valuable as we grow older and begin to understand the importance of balance.

There is also an unexpected benefit. The poles encourage you to stand tall. When I focus on engaging my abdominal and back muscles and keeping my head lifted gently upward to support my spine, these simple devices become more than walking aids. They become companions in movement.

Perhaps they will take me further than I once expected—along quiet paths beside the ocean or through small stretches of countryside I might previously have avoided.

And as I walk, I hope to observe the world in a simple way, much as Alberto Caeiro once suggested: seeing nature plainly for what it is, without trying to force magic upon it.

Simply noticing.
Simply walking.

The Portuguese have a lovely way of describing this kind of attention to life. They speak of recolher pequenas coisas da vida—gathering the small things of life.

Sometimes those small things return to guide us years later.

A walk in a forest.
A group of hikers with poles.
A memory that quietly shows us how to keep moving forward.
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 This essay is a companion piece to an earlier reflection. Both explore Lisbon through memory, literature, and landscape, but each approaches the city from a slightly different perspective.​

“Tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena.”  
— Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem

Seagulls stood on sand in the middle of the gallery.

Around them, ghosts of dark figures in wide hats sat at a table as if engaged in quiet conversation, their pale faces emerging from deep shadows. Visitors moved slowly through the room, pausing before the paintings as though they had stepped into a dream. Sacred archeological pieces of Pessoa's life were shown in paintings surrounding the setting of a table from Pessoa's favorite restaurant Cafe Martinho on the water front where he met with fellow artists to plan the introduction of Portuguese culture to the rest of the world.

It was 1981, and I was standing in an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The Portuguese artist António Costa Pinheiro had created the series as a tribute to Fernando Pessoa and the mysterious world of voices he brought to life through his heteronyms.

In the gallery, Pessoa’s universe had been transformed into a kind of theatrical landscape. The figures seemed both familiar and enigmatic—echoes perhaps of Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, or Bernardo Soares. The seagulls standing on sand suggested the harbor and the river, as though Lisbon itself had quietly entered the room.

I did not yet know that this exhibition would open a doorway into Pessoa’s imagination—or that Pessoa himself would eventually lead me to Lisbon.

The artist had lived through the years of the Salazar dictatorship, a time when many Portuguese writers and artists endured imprisonment or exile. When he was finally released, he left Portugal for Paris and later Munich, carrying his country with him through his art. He proved to be a sweet and generous man, willing to correspond and share his thoughts. I was fortunate enough to acquire several of his works, small anchors to a cultural world that was just beginning to reveal itself to me.

Through that exhibition I entered the writings of Fernando Pessoa, and Pessoa, inevitably, led me to Lisbon.

One of the works that affected me most deeply was Pessoa’s small but powerful book of poems, Mensagem. In it he evokes the historical figures who shaped Portugal’s destiny—kings, navigators, dreamers who imagined a nation reaching beyond its shores.

Among them, the figure who stayed with me most strongly was King Dinis.

D. Dinis was known as both the Farmer King and the Poet King. He planted the great pine forests along the Portuguese coast, forests that would later provide timber for the ships of the navigators. But in Pessoa’s poem those pines become something more than a practical enterprise. The wind moving through their branches seems almost to whisper toward the sea, as if the trees themselves were dreaming of voyages yet to come.

The image is simple and haunting: the murmur of the forest becoming the murmur of the ocean.

When I later walked among the pines near Belém, close to the great monastery of Jerónimos where so many explorers once prayed before sailing into the unknown, I suddenly understood the poem in a new way. The scent of resin in the air, the wide river opening toward the Atlantic, the quiet movement of wind through the trees—it felt as though the landscape itself was repeating Pessoa’s lines.

Lisbon is a city where history and imagination mingle easily.

At the Miradouro de Santa Catarina, beneath the brooding stone figure of Adamastor gazing toward the Tagus, the city gathers each evening to watch the light fade over the water. In Chiado, I like to sit quietly toward the back of A Brasileira, imagining Pessoa and his companions among the artists and writers who once gathered there. Along the river in the afternoon, the broad movement of the Tagus seems to carry centuries of departures and returns.

Other writers soon joined Pessoa in guiding my understanding of the city. The elegant social observations of Eça de Queirós, the philosophical depth of José Saramago, and more recently the searching psychological voice of António Lobo Antunes all reveal different facets of Lisbon’s soul. I also discovered inspired lovers of Portugal like the Swiss Pascal Mercier and Italian Antonio Tabucchi whose writing has brought Lisbon to me through philosophical and poetic images in works like Night Train to Lisbon, Requiem, an Hallucination, and Pereira Maintains.
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Together they show that Lisbon is not only a place but a cultural inheritance—one that extends across centuries of poetry, philosophy, and memory.

A line from Night Train to Lisbon has often returned to me: we leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, and there are parts of ourselves we can recover only by going back there.

Perhaps that is why Lisbon never feels entirely distant.

Some part of my life still sits quietly at a café in Chiado. Another part walks along the river in the afternoon light. And somewhere among the pines near Belém, the wind still moves through the branches, carrying that soft murmur Pessoa heard so long ago.

The whisper of the pines calling to the sea.

And when I think back to that gallery in Lisbon in 1981, I realize that the journey had already begun there, among the seagulls and the silent figures gathered around Pessoa’s table.

A few months ago a friend asked me to give him a rundown of the jazz clubs I frequent in Paris.  I love Paris and I love jazz but that does not make me an expert.  However, when in Paris I have my little haunts.  

Years ago I never went to Paris without spending every night I could in a club called Le Bilboquet.  This sweet little club on the left bank at 13 Rue St. Benoit, originally an old cellar first operated under the name of the Club San Germain frequented by Django Reinhardt and all the jazz performers who were fascinated in those days by the be bop from America. They chose the caves because they were available and cheap and they could play what they wanted without being criticized by the classical jazz fanatics who were suspicious of the new wave of music, considering it to be unworthy of the name jazz.  In these clubs young and old gathered to dance and listen and Django loved to play there.

When I first visited Le Bilboquet in that same location, it was both a restaurant on the upper levels overlooking the club and the music and a jazz club of the old style with small tables and red velvet stools or red covered couches and was a very friendly place to listen to the bands who played there. I loved the nights they featured Ahmet Gulbay’s band. Ahmet on the very hot piano and with a tremendous smile was of Turkish descent and welcomed friends and visiting musicians to join in the fun.  One night he had invited a young high school student visiting Paris with his parents from Berkeley, California to play with him. It was delightful. 

I met many interesting and friendly people both French and from other countries including Turkey during the time I was a regular. One sad night I showed up to find the club closed for ever! I felt absolutely lost.
On subsequent visits to Paris I searched for other clubs but never found one quite like Le Bilboquet although they have opened a new club called Le Bilboquet rive doite near the old opera house with a dance floor and featuring Swing, Be Bop and Shuffle which could be worth a try. 
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On a trip dedicated to following the footsteps of Django Reinhardt I came across a listing at a website I follow for a club featuring jazz manouche on Thursday nights. That night they were featuring Simba Baumgartner. Recognizing the last name of the first son of Django from a first marriage, Lousson Baumgartner, I learned he was the great grandson of Django. My daughter and I hurried over to the Jardin de Cluny where the club MONK is located and were blown away by the music and the intimate atmosphere there. Simba was sweet and shy and his music was out of this world. MONK in La Taverne de Cluny (5th arrondissement) is one place I will visit every time I am in Paris, especially on Thursday evenings when they feature jazz manouche.

I wanted to show my daughter some other authentic venues so we visited another “cave” venue called 38 Riv. on Rue de Rivoli (4th arrondissement). It was so cool and the group from Brazil who played that night was great.  The club itself is worth the trip.

The site I use to locate the jazz I want to experience is parisjazzclub.net. They give you a run down of who is playing and where and it is very complete. 

 With their help I visited several clubs including Duc de Lombards in the 1st arrondissement, with a high quality of jazz musicians. I was happy to take in a show by Hugo Lippi, a very talented jazz manouche guitarist who had just released a new album entitled Comfort Zone with the favorite, Manoir de mes rêves. The music was great and the atmosphere oh so French. 

Conveniently Due de Lombard is surrounded by less formal clubs like Sunside in an adjacent alley-like street filled with jazz clubs and cafes. Some of my all time favorites artists have played outstanding concerts in the intimate space of Sunset. You never know who might be booked!  Bireli LaGrene for example was booked there for three concerts just after I missed a very fancy concert of his at a beautiful site due to Covid issues.

There are numerous clubs all over town so if you are courageous, just try some out. New Morning in the 10th arrondissement,  Baiser Salé in the 1st arrondissement where I see Sylvain Luc an extremely accomplished jazz manouche player is playing January 26! Caveau de la Huchette in the 5th arrondisement. That is just to name a few!

If you look carefully you will find all kinds of venues in Paris featuring a generous  variety of music.  Just go and have fun!

Mafra central to Saramago's wonderful saga of Balthasar and Blimunda

Luxurious evenings in a neighborhood park.

Antonio Tabucci offers recipes in his wandering amongst old friends in search of answers to old questions In Requiem, an Hallucination

Strolling on Avenida Libertad.

A literary group still meeting here after 40 years. The conversations continue at Brasileira..

You cannot cross the same river twice as the River goes on and on. (Heraclitus)