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

FIFTEENTH EPISODE
(Fighting against all the boredom of the world)

“That’s right. That’s what you did, in your own way, back then. But I decided to go a step further and set my sail towards total, unbound freedom. If there is such a thing. I just want to try it. If I don’t, I’ll never know.”
“Well, I want to confess something too.”
“What?”
“Back then, as you say, I also should’ve turned my back on business. I should’ve sold all that shit. These days – well I can’t complain, I do lead a happy life… it’s just that sometimes I even have to take sleeping pills cos of the damn print shop! Can you believe it?!”
“Oh yes, I can. But you’re still in time to pull the plug on all that crap. Life’s three days long, and two are for separating the wheat from the chaff. Vocation and heritage, lust and blindness, desire and restraint, freedom and inertia, etc, etc… Am I right or wrong?”
“Haven’t you gone back to being a kid, man! Who would tell…”
“It must be genetic. Do you remember that time with the paper boats on the Nabão river?”
“Don’t I… Our own Discoveries.”
That day, by nightfall, I went out for dinner with Albe and our two kids, Ester and Isaías. By the Tagus, not a breeze, not a ship or sound, only that feeling of the both of us, forever at the Avuello Bar, fighting against all the boredom of the world as if we were fortune tellers for a chorus of moons and our soft earthquake of brief seconds had been, more than passion, a lucid enchantment.

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “I was pretty blown out of the water by his readiness, but saw Albe in the backdrop, behind her dad who was almost hugging me with the unexpected offer”)

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)