The Giant Cloud
A novel in twenty episodes
By Luís Carmelo
(transl. Bernardo Palmeirim)

THIRD EPISODE
(After a moment’s indecision...)

Albe takes a last look at the mirror, closes the door to her hotel room and catches the elevator down to the breakfast room. We’re standing at the dawn of the world, she thinks without knowing, without even saying it.

The elevator door opened and Albe came out at last.

In front of her, Edmundo was crystallized and bewitched by the open newspaper that blossomed out like the rose the sweet French lady had imagined and who, after a moment’s indecision, comes out to surprise and cut him out of the spell. Forever.
He stands up, sits down, stands up, curling the newspaper on the oval table as Albe says she’d had a good night’s sleep. Hi, since yesterday - How long are you staying? - Yeah, I also like to get up early - Do you work or study, do you like chocolate? And Albe went on saying that she was a jurist, a lawyer, that she’d graduated but a month ago. “A calling? Me? Perhaps.”
What is the world but a strange crossroad of vocations, of propensities, of callings, of.
Edmundo had his white handkerchief in his hand and Albe was wearing her long pajamas which matched the color of his handkerchief; a joint sunspot breaking loose and their voice, less dry now, finding its place and timbre; and the tone, at last, anchoring in their eyes. - Who are you, anyway? – In which balcony were you on, after all? - Secrets and storms are exchanged, and behind them, the jar remains crystalline, tall and glazed, an immense vocation of nameless transparency.

Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “Edmundo tried to grasp the euphoria, enchantment, and the nothingness that remained after so much obvious surprise…”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)