“He had been in Chaves for a writers’ event, folks from Portugal and Galicia. And became fascinated with the guy. The fellow made his fortune in Brazil, set the foundations of an important part of the Portuguese banking and, among other things, order the creation of this garden that makes the Madalena quarter one of Chaves’ most important areas. Pedro even found out how much the guy paid for the garden: 18 million réis! One day, the historian came across a bunch of letters from his grandfather where there was mention of chronoxide. And he began an obsessive research that made him read a lot and unveil connections which might seem fanciful to naïve ones. ‘If the steel is wroughted by the fire, the water is ingested because of the air’, he read in a little known Paracelso text. Nothing could be truer, he concurred. When he learned of Mr. Cândido’s insistence in buying the steel of the garden’s gates from the local blacksmiths by what is nowadays the Largo de São Roque, Pedro followed that lead. And he was right. He found out that the establishment had been recommended to Mr. Cândido by someone he had met years earlier, in Brazil, «a strange individual with trimmed beard and a cutting gaze», according to the letters of Herculano Marcos Inglês de Sousa inherited by his nephew: Oswald de Andrade, none other than the author of the Anthropophagic Manifest, the text responsible for the consolidation of Modernism in Brazilian literature. The spoils of the vigorous epistolographic activity are the shadows of a time when memory was dependent on them, the calligraphy testified to the identity and intention, the ink or paper choice certified the circumstances or contingencies, and the wrapping assisted in dating and arranging the ideas. Yes, words were above all else ideas, not sounds.”

João Morales

 

Short story collection stemmed from the second edition of the Chaves literary festival Ponte Escrita – Encontro Luso-Galaico de Escritores, with stories by Ana Cristina Silva, André Gago, António Mota, Ernesto Salgado Areias, Fausta Cardoso Pereira, Fernando Pinto do Amaral, Fran Alonso, Inês Botelho, João Morales, José Leon Machado, Margarida Fonseca Santos, Maria de Lourdes Soares, Possidónio Cachapa, Rosalía Fernández Rial, and Rui Sousa.

“Listen”

Some people remain ever since childhood, and some places become a life.

“Listen” later had a second publishing on the November 2021 issue of the online magazine InComunidade..