TE19 Iberian Adventure

José Luís Peixoto

one when he had lost his mother on Augusta Street. He was a boy of four; they unclasped hands for the minutes his mother had to try on a cardigan, had to look at herself in the mirror. José took advantage of that freedom to explore the shop. The open door beckoned him; then he explored the street, the crowd, and when he came back in, already the store was entirely different. He has these memories well-arranged for he heard his mother tell the story many times. José did not go so far as to get scared or dismiss the pleasure of that adventure; it was his mother who panicked, who took long to quiet her panting even after having found him, comforted by employees of ready-to-wear shops who surrounded andfannedherwithlidsof cardboardboxes.Thatwasafragmented remembrance because he was four when it happened; he merely clung to the immediate present; the past crushed onto his back. Still he got to the point of mixing up this childish episode with that adult disorientation—finding himself too old at the age of twenty-eight, thinking he needed to get a second novel written, believing he would lose his name and existence without getting a second novel written, imagining himself invisible or dead. Also, there was the difference that, when he was a child, Lisbon was dazzling. In Bucelas, in the yard, in the kitchen, his motherwould tell him they were going to Lisbon whenever she wanted to fill him with electricity. So it was for quite a while, but it was bound to change—either he changed or Lisbon did. His mother never got to learn that José had gotten lost in his adulthood. That piece of information was farther away from her world than the long thirty kilometers that set Bucelas apart

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