Galego | English

Fiction

Em Tránsito

By Raquel Miragaia

About this book

Nine characters in transit in nine different short-stories, characters that are amazed at the logic of a world that they sometimes do not share or understand. Surrounded by a hostile environment, they built their own islands of safety or, at least a simulacrum of safety. And they almost always manage to impose themselves on the world because in the end reality is not as it is but as we make it.

The author presents in her second book a series of displaced characters inhabiting places that were not designed for them. The anonymous city is the stage where silences are too heavy on the shoulders of its inhabitants.

Book fragment

Differences in speed. The street where artisans used to live still had some colour, perhaps some harmonising light, maybe the possibility of a ray of light. Almost without traffic, without pedestrians, without life. All the life was on Avenida 5 de Setembro, a monument to places of passage, to acknowledgement, to provisionality, with thousands of people moving, with cars carrying them, as if their objective was fulfilled just in moving. Obviously violence was not that, but words were polluted when they referred to the wrong facts. But it was also true that there was no other way to say it. She felt hurt by the silences that were filtered by the noise, she was hurt by the Nothingness, by that relentless emptiness built on cars and horns, poorly repaired exhausts, police sirens and the taxis called from afar. It was not a refined violence, no subtly schemed and sophisticated plans, strategies of pain. Hers was a harsh suffering, without any duplicity, like a heat wave slapping your face and staying there, a second skin stuck to yours you cannot remove. Violence installed in the daily plan, as a routine duty.