“Four months earlier to the day, on August 14, I had had the unforeseen good luck to meet Pascoaes in Oporto, for the first time and also the last. The impression of his emaciated, at times twitching, but always kind old face is fading away. The lively eyes and the humorous corners of the wide, thin-lipped mouth were strikingly framed, though, by the severe dark hat and suit which plain people wear in Southern countries. I may forget the fireworks of his conversation, with which he easily kept the younger men hanging at his lips. (In those days a Pascoaes cult existed in Portugal; perhaps it still does.) But his embrace I am still able to feel, the most Portuguese of all Portuguese embraces I have been accorded. When we took leave from him, my friend and I, to return to the city, he singled me, the stranger, out and hugged me with a particular warmth and fondness. Did he want to enthral me forever, by putting into that farewell gesture all the human solidarity of a Portuguese? It was the gesture of one who was clinging to life with his last strength. Perhaps it was magic “America,” from whence I came and to which I was soon to return, that he wishes to draw into his immaterial universe of living trees and mountains, in my person, one of the few, perhaps the last who had come to him from the young continent of hope? It meant no love or friendship or goodwill—we had hardly met!—but it sent out a stream of sympathy that will not cease.”

From Gerald M. Moser’s The Embrace of a Poet, Books Abroad, Vol.28, No. 4