TE19 Iberian Adventure

Autobiografia (excerpt) José Luís Peixoto Translated from Portuguese by Regis Friggi

Saramago wrote the novel’s last sentence.

Captive, his eyes peered within each of those words; foreman, he appraised them from the inside as if houses. Can one live here? he asked in the silence of the interior, his and the houses’, getting only echo’s answer, optimistic evidence of a created place, a viable space, a habitat. Then, along the way lined up by that sentence, he strolled before the words—street of dignified, solid fronts—, measured the space between each, compared the nuances of color they exhibited, reflections of a sun that shone from the core of the novel. His attention still on that wordscape, he drew his hands away from the computer keyboard; they might be two birds, but were really hands of a seventy-four-year-old man, hands of human skin, provisionally weightless, oblivious of gravity. He landed them on the wooden tabletop either side of the keyboard, and his fingers found individual resting positions, some straighter, others more curled up at the phalanges. Under the table, in the shadow, he slid his feet off the slippers, leaving them halfway out, still in the textile comfort and already in freedom. But that

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