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

EIGHTH EPISODE
(And she stayed laughing outside time …)

The wake of the caravelle makes Edmundo lift up his head to face the then clean sky, smooth in amplitude and daydream.
For an instant it makes him guess the possible silence, in face of the windstorm of asteroids and comets of he that plays hide-and-seek and truth-or-dare. He sets down the detective novel on the towel and steps out of his reclining chair in a slight spleen, going over to the stone edge of the swimming pool.
It was about then that Edmundo’s eyes were transfigured and the harpsichord and pianola were heard playing on the back of that last cloud which looked like a starfish. It was also then that Edmundo, from one moment to the next, forgot about the price of paper, the telegram, bullfighting and even about the burnt-out sparks from his Ford Escort.
Above the swimming pool, from a web of strings, hung little triangular flags, blue and red. And she floated under them, adrift with open arms joined in a clean, pure, ancient ring. Over that pale blue, Edmundo made time come to a halt and proceeded to look at her from above, from the side, with the ubiquity that sends flutters up your esophagus.
A shudder.
She swims to the opposite side of the pool, slowly, in this generous moment of existence, holding onto the buoys and sliding - then suddenly, in slow motion, waves goodbye in Edmundo’s direction. The Portuguese man almost waved back, his shy hand rising; his arms opening out into an embarrassed smile left unpronounced. And she stayed laughing outside time, afar, across the universe; now turning her face towards the water, to Thebes, to Haifa, God knows where else.
Perhaps trying to say that time is spun in the same way in which the moon is liquefied in the enigmatic solstice seas.
It was during that moment of awe, Edmundo confesses to António, “that the man walked up to me. Her father, go figure!”

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “I was tired of that tacky Lisbon which smelt of grey uniforms and the sulphur at the piers, whence boats left with recruits for Angola”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)