The Return of the Caravels: A Novel by António Lobo Antunes

Author:António Lobo Antunes [Antunes, António Lobo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780802139559
Google: 5GWbqCdug08C
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2002-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

From the mosque or French brothel luxuries of the Hotel Ritz they transferred us to a boardinghouse in Colares with a lot of flags from different countries in front and torn sheets and walls dirtied by those who’d returned from Africa before them and had wiped the green slime from their boots on the ceiling, and then to another one, two stories high, a hundred yards beyond, where milk cartons and candy wrappers were accumulating in the empty swimming pool. As they placed the wedding picture on a sideboard and the sewing machine behind the drapes, the husband felt they were living in some sort of ruins of a cataclysm or in an abandoned cemetery: the broken chandeliers hung down off the paint like heads bent in displeasure, not entirely mournful; the wood of the cabinets had been carved up with a knife; the scars on the blinds, almost reduced to their wire rods, bore witness to merciless combat with Arab ghosts; and the elevators that led directly to paradise, where Saint George, dressed as Gongalo Mendes de Maia, was crushing his round-bellied dragon over a cloud of clay, would break down between floors groaning as if from a sprain.

From the second boardinghouse, where at night we inhaled the pregnant-bitch smell of the sea, seen in the distance above the eucalyptus trees in the shape of a dark fog that blended with the sky and where the large ships of the dead danced weight- lessly, they moved us, along with twenty-odd other families, to an unoccupied house in Ericeira that faced the escarpment by the ocean where the dampness condensed into little birds the color of water that the waves spat out from crag to crag. The house must have belonged to a colonel because it smelled strongly of a mess hall and when the woman hid the sewing machine under the couch she came across some infantry leggings, without buckles now, gathering a crust of mildew, and some radish stems on the floor. A gentleman with his hair parted in the middle and a small trimmed mustache, right out of a turn-of-the-century fashion magazine, gathered them together casually into rooms that were at the top of an irregular tower with balconies overlooking the cliffs, the night, and the mouth of the Lisandro, he had them served coffee in the morning and soup at nightfall, and he disappeared forever on the road to Lixbon on board a jeep driven by a sailor more earthbound than a mole, who’d deserted a long time ago or had never experienced the trade winds of adventure.

At that time of year, almost October, there were still a half dozen vacationers in Ericeira and a few awnings on the frigid beach in front of the alleys with chalets that were like ancient urinals, invaded by virgin vines and scorpions. The wind carried along the bells from Mafra, which sounded like the remote gaze of evaporated ancestors. Autumn and the ash gray of its smoke made them

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