Sometimes there are verses in poems that can shed light on an entire literary project. This is particularly the case with Fernando Pessoa. In this article, I use a single verse by Ricardo Reis as a path to reading Pessoa’s undertakings from the narrative proposal that we are really “tales telling tales” (or “contos contando contos”). This text considers the heteronymic figures as voices of themselves as well as of each other, telling tales intertwined in textual productions that are often metanarrative and self-reflexive. My proposal is that Fernando Pessoa uses our human tendency for storytelling to propose characters that tell their stories in texts, bringing them closer as well to our common human experience.
