The Giant Cloud

A novel in twenty episodes

By Luís Carmelo

(transl. Bernardo Palmeirim)

FOURTH EPISODE

(Edmundo tried to grasp the euphoria...)

António Romeu was Edmundo’s best childhood friend.
Twenty one years after the radiant summer at the Costa Brava, on the 13th August 1989, he decided to transform his life into a work of art.
The story begins on the day he won the special summer lottery. He requested anonymity and, without warning, discarded his headaches at the wood industry, left his home, wife and kids, turned his back on the local coffeehouse, soccer, his neighborhood and all the routine he had accumulated for years on end. For the first time ever, António was leaving his hometown and settling in Lisbon.
So as not to miss any crack or crevice of his new city, he rented a panoramic suite at the Penta, and in good company.
On the same 13th, António rang Edmundo.

The rendezvous of the stunned print collector with his old paper-boat building buddy - which they sent floating downriver, weir after weir, as if they were traveling to the river mouth of a perfect world where cities are of glass, and airplanes are birds copulating on windowsills -; their encounter in the very real Lisbon still had this immense childlike complicity of dry-mud windmills, cardboard dolls and newspapers made out of tinfoil from cigarette packs; the encounter of these old friends on this sunny day, looking back on glorious others, was sealed with an unexpected and long hug; the host asked for calm and guaranteed the exclusivity of the grand mystery of life, of the great secret, proclaiming it with whisky shinning between pointy ice cubes and gestures shifting the light which extended itself obliquely over the floor.
Across, one would say constrained and still, Edmundo tried to grasp the euphoria, enchantment, and the nothingness that remained after so much obvious surprise.

(Next episode of The Giant Cloud: “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...")

Continues

(see here portuguese updated version)