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

FIFTH EPISODE

(I never imagined you’d come and tell me all the details...)

Then came the story, one of those rare ones, made out of experience itself, with neither explanation nor reflection to stop or sustain it. António has sat down on the black leather couch and, shaped by his own fresh and decisive role (for there are many that are not), rubs his hands together, remembering what had set off this encounter:
“You were the only guy I know that’s told me, and me alone, a secret.”
“That’s right. It is.”
“I remember it as if it were today. You came from Spain all sparkling with energy, in that Ford Escort - it was blue, right? And you showed up in town, all agitated, telling me about Albe. You weren’t the open-hearted, mushy type, yet suddenly you spilled it all out, all the stuff a guy goes through and that I thought, well, that people live and devour, under certain circumstances, and that then it just all slips by. In other words, try to understand what I’m saying - I never imagined you’d come and tell me all the details of one of those movie-like love stories, that on top of everything, had happened to you. I don’t know if you remember it like I do…”
“You bet I do…”
“It was damn hot that day, the twentieth or something of August, some twenty years ago, and we were both by the river… I was silent and even slightly stunned, in suspense, and you, you were talking like I’d never seen you talk before, with this huge glitter coming out of your eyes, one hell of a poetry, an awesome sense of each particular, it even seemed that the story you were telling me was this thing one shouldn’t touch, fragile, silk-like, and that you were going round it, for once, outside your intimacy with Albe. Wasn’t it?”
“That was ages ago, but yes, that’s how it happened.”

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “Passion often brings along optic distortion. We see the cloud in the loved one and in the cloud we see our own face rhyming with Atlantis…”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)