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

NINETH EPISODE
(I was truly tired and with no great hope at heart…)

“He touched my back ever so slightly, while he pointed to Albe and smiled, smiled, overflowing, and went on and on, without me having asked a thing: ‘That’s my daughter, that’s my daughter!’ and I just stood there, dumbfounded, realizing, perhaps, the oldest lesson of geometry and optics in the world: that a straight line unites at the very least two points, but can bring together, by pure illusion, many more. I went back to my reclining chair, but minutes later, that brief encounter with her father made me notice a girl in her young twenties and eyes avid with an unfulfilled aura of candor and impenetrable beauty. Her name was Albe.”

Just we, talking about callings at such an hour! The face of time was before us, defying boredom. Boredom of everything that threatens to turn astray or even vanish, if at a given time a sign, a gesture undermining the apathy of hesitation does not come forth. I looked at Albe, and for some seconds, some brief, unspeakable seconds, I felt the just notion of my fatigue. I was truly tired and with no great hope at heart.
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; tired of that Lisbon full of submissive, quixotic situations, and lighter permits; tired of that Lisbon exploding with its canned hypocrisy, where everything was small and feeble, excepting the new Tagus bridge, smooth "Benfica", Joaquim Andrade do "Sangalhos" and the evident miracles of Fátima.

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud:“I needed to clear my head, and above all, to escape our national graveyard.”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)