Galego | English

Fiction

O soño da febre

By Miguel Anxo Murado

About this book

This book has a peculiar main character: fever. Fever as a character, as a metaphor of imagination, of dreams, of literature, in fact.

Using a real event in his life (a fever outbreak in Cairo), the author presents a series of surprising stories, sometimes realistic, sometimes symbolic but always presided over by the ghost of fever. In the line of Memoria de derribos, the author explores once again his personal imaginary universe in a book in which the atmosphere “knits like yarn” the different stories with the main plot line.

Book fragment

During the autumn of 2002 I became really sick in Cairo. I had been to the house of a French engineer the night before, speaking about Egypt and about the living and the dead, a stone's throw from the Pyramids. His house was in the neighbourhood of Gizeh and, while the guests had dinner on the terrace in the blue moonlight of October, I felt on the back of my neck a slight but sinister breath coming from the desert populated by tombs thousands of years old.

The next day, I was supposed to travel back to Jerusalem, where I was living then. But that night in the hotel I went down with fever. I rolled between the sheets, soaked in sweat as if I had suddenly gone crazy. I knew I was delirious and everything looked threatening: the lights of the night that came in through the blinds, the fan spinning furiously over my head... I was suffocating. I managed to open the door to the balcony but this only helped the fever to call me more, the fever that came from the Nile and that that hot and humid autumn was attacking the population of Cairo in a frenzy. An army of mosquitoes covered the waters of the river and from there they spread to the whole city.