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

SIXTH EPISODE
(One of the most important days of my whole life…)

“Today I realize you were just letting off steam, watching yourself outside your story, at the same time you heard yourself tell it. As if you needed to, how shall I put it… stop confusing your image with yourself.”

António went on:
“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… But check this out… I’m here, at the Penta, without knowing why yet, talking to you about passions… What’s going on?”

António lit his cigar, got up and walked up to the window.
Edmundo turned his neck around as far as he could and listened for a sign of explanation.
Here was the first long pause since they had met. António blew out a long and straight cloud of smoke, a kind of zeppelin dissipating in the air and smiled:

“That day, Edmundo, was for me perhaps one of the most important days of my whole life. I realized, for the first time ever, that someone had come to me, not to ask for this or that, not to make some practical arrangement, to have a drink or moan about life, not to try and set me up for whatever reason, to recall or forget some appraisal or bad luck, but just to tell and share, alone, a secret. While we’re at it, did Albe ever know that you told me the whole story, every detail?”

“Well, actually… no.”

“I knew it. Pure intuition. And some things a guy simply doesn’t forget. That’s why I was determined, since last night, to talk to you before anyone else.”

“But tell me, man! Talk to me about what? Spill it out!”

António sat back down on his chair, glanced at his watch and refilled both glasses with more whisky.

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “Word after word, scene after scene, crime after crime, and Edmundo keeps remembering the price of paper, the Lisbon telegram, the bullfight…”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)