The sea of the Algarve is made of cardboard like theater scenery, and the English don't realize it: they conscientiously spread their towels on the sawdust sand, protect themselves with dark glasses from the paper sun, stroll enthralled on the stage of Albufeira where public employees disguised as carnival hippies, squatting on the ground, inflict on them Moroccan necklaces secretly manufactured by the tourism board, and end the afternoon by anchoring in artificial esplanades, where they're served make-believe drinks in nonexistent glasses that leave in the mouth the flavorless taste of the whiskey furnished the actors on television dramas. After the Alentejo, evaporated in the horizontal landscape like butter on a burnt piece of toast, the chimneys that seem built from matchsticks and glue by skillful refugees and the waves that noiselessly dilute themselves on the beach in the docile crochet of foam always make him feel like one of the sugar figures on wedding cakes, the startled inhabitant of a world of sweets and croquettes on toothpicks simulating houses and streets. He had been once been in Armação da Pêra with Luísa and been almost unable to leave the hotel, startled by that unusual hoax of backdrops that everyone seemed to take seriously, lubricating themselves with pretend creams under an orange-colored spotlight operated by an invisible electrician from a hole in the clouds: confined to the room's balcony by an absurdity that frightened him, wrapped in a bathrobe that made him look like a defeated boxer in whom the marks of punches were replaced by razor cuts, he contented himself with watching the family down there, amid a pile of sandals and slippers, like disciplined Boy Scouts around their ritual campfire. At night, a rusted fan expelled in his direction the gentle warm breath of a diabetic prompter, and a constellation of lights dangled from wires on tin boats, reduced to the plane geometry of outline. Lying in bed, embracing Luísa, he watched the curtains flutter in the phosphorescent brightness of a cellophane dawn and, intrigued, wondered whether the lovemaking was nothing more than a frenetic exercise dedicated to a nonexistent audience, for whom he articulated his moaning responses with an actor's pathetic conviction. And now, so many years later, as I was leaving Balaia for Lisbon, I hoped, almost unwillingly, to find you in the garden, in the midst of blond foreigners, tragic and motionless like Phaedra, in whose vacant eyes dwells the resigned solitude of statues and dogs. I would sit on a bench, between the affectionless varicose veins of an old German woman and the intertwined thighs of a teenage couple floating on a raft of hashish, smiling at no one in the happiness of an unknown dimension, until suddenly seeing you, on the other side of the square, with a wicker basket on your shoulder, your hair parted in the middle like a squaw, coming toward me like the girl in the Repimpa mattress commercials who recycled Greta Garbo's eyeglasses.

The uniform impersonality of the hotel produced in him an exalting sensation of freedom: no object of his marked the furniture like dogs' urine on the bark of trees. The long corridors full of numbered doors brought to mind fantasies of an expensive brothel, just as the small grocery stores of his childhood had been transformed into gigantic supermarkets similar to space stations, and trotting down the hallway from room to room, he enjoyed imagining men plunging headlong panting over pairs of knees perfumed by essences from the Orient, before washing with Ach Brito soap in the contradictory jets of the shower. The employees at the reception area, amid books and keys, officiated with clerical dignity. Guys with pipes slept off their lunch fillets with blankets of foreign newspapers forgotten in their scrawny laps. And he felt, entering the revolving door, as unpredictable as a roulette ball, capable of the winning bet of meeting some Norwegian woman or of the losing play of sitting on a beachfront esplanade, ruminating acrimony over the fizz of ginger ale.

At the end of the day I licked your skin as cows do the hollow of rocks, that whitish spider web that the sun extends on the belly in concentric designs like pitch in the sands of ebb tide and stretches to the hairs of the pubis in an unexpected shellfish taste. Little by little the cardboard sea changed color as night approached, illuminated by a purple filter that confers on the Queen Anne furniture the melancholy of seaside tercets. The last people were deserting the beach, staggering with baskets, umbrellas, and chairs in the downcast exodus of refugees of war, pursued by lilac clouds of twilight lustrous as contented cheeks. The streetlamps revealed plastic bushes in which windup crickets trilled the tinfoil monotony of their wings. And I slowly ceased to see you, as you dissolved into the blackness coming through the bedroom window in irresistible surges of garlic breath, forcing me to feel my way toward you as one searches for the light switch, in the hope that your smile would open a crack of light in the darkness of the pillow and your tremulous octopus gestures find mine in a timid challenge of tenderness.

He was leaving Quinta da Balaia toward Lisbon, from the walnut and egg-white villages of Balaia where plastic people spent their plastic holidays in the plastic boredom of the rich, under trees resembling tissue-paper garlands that the green pupil of the swimming pool reflected in the methylene blue of the water. He had sometimes awakened in those marzipan houses with the eye-liner sun underscoring the eyelids of the shutters and conferring on the crumpled sheets the tone of the wadded brown paper of mountains in Nativity scenes, and moved about on the floor tiles as if inside a snow globe, looking in the kitchen for grapes as heavy as those in the canvases of Spanish painters, whose white flesh left in his mouth the thick taste of blood. In the sky that resembled a river of open hands, round clouds swung gently, hanging by nylon threads from transparent clamps of air like room keys in a hotel lobby. On the varnished grass, an old man in bathing trunks was reading the newspaper, suddenly without the dignity of his suit, the pomp of a tie, the competent cough of winter, crossing his thin legs like silverware on a plate, staring at the calligraphic birds drawn on the notebooks of two lines of branches. He had sometimes awakened in the silence of a still house, motionless like a dead butterfly among the bodiless shadows of the night, and gazed, sitting in bed, at the diffuse outlines of the armoires, the clothes scattered on chairs like weary spider webs, the rectangle of the mirror that drank the flowers as the banks of Hell drank the distressed silhouette of the dead. He would go outside to observe the insects around the light bulbs in the quiet of summer's secret womb, woman's warm and secret womb in summer, feeling the sweet putrescent odor of the East on his skin, hearing the disordered sound of the acacias, and thought I'm on a sunflower farm in Baixa do Cassanje between the hills of Dala Samba and Chiquita, I'm standing on the transparent plain of the Baixa do Cassanje turned toward the far-off sea of Luanda, the roiling sea of Luanda the color of oil from trawlers and of the easy laughter of the blacks, thought I'm at my grandfather's country house near the tile benches and the idle henhouses, if I close my eyes, floating white feathers will descend on me on the inside of my skull with the lightness of snow, and he squatted on the porch, incredulous, under the glassy stars of the Algarve, glued to the ceiling of the set in some mysterious geometry. And, as always happened in the course of insomnia, the crazies of childhood, the tender, humble, indignant, arm-waving crazies of childhood began parading one by one through the darkness, in a procession at once wretched and sumptuous of poor clowns lit from the side by the oblique spotlight of memory, to the sound of old music from the gramophone in the attic, groaning a rheumatic waltz about wooden horses covered with the dull mire of dust:

There was Monsieur Anatole, the French engraver of whom his father had spoken, Monsieur Anatole to whom he attributed, not knowing why, the white head of hair and the lead- colored irises of Marc Chagall, painting watercolors of clocks with wings, blind violinists, and lovers embracing, Monsieur Anatole who was writing the novel Livre Plus Que Social, and had answered a doctor, when asked if he had children, with disgusted disdain:

Docteur, je ne fabrique pas de cadavres.

There were the crazies of Benfica, the elderly man who suddenly opened his raincoat at the schoolhouse door to exhibit the rag of his sex, the drunk Florentino sitting in the walkway in the rain, in a grandiose pose, insulting the rapid legs of passersby with the complicated vehemence of wine, the gentle crazies of Benfica faded like photographs in the confused album of childhood, the bell-ringer who played Papagaio Loiro during the Elevation of the noonday mass, his surplice trailing in the wind like the cape of a galloping knight, the woman who kept the host-wafers at home in a small box in hopes of one day reconstituting the entire body of God, the crazies of Benfica who would gather at night in packs like stray dogs and scream their horrible barking protests in the silent vastness of the countryside.

He passed by the office in Balaia, next to the tennis court and the beds of yellow flowers whose petals were slowly opening like thighs at the gynecologist, submissive and inert between the gloved fingers of the sun, and there came into his head the deranged man in a baby carriage reading magazines about quantum mechanics in the Monsanto woods, heedless of people's surprise and astonishment, a composed guy in a coat and glasses reading magazines about quantum mechanics in the Monsanto woods in a rusted baby carriage and how, upon noting the man's strange naturalness and the stupefaction halfway between laughter and alarm on the part of others, he had decided to become a psychiatrist to better understand (he thought) the strange ways of life of adults, whose insecurity he sometimes suspected behind their cigarettes and their mustaches as they bent over their dinner soup with pontifical gravity. And he remembered, driving the car along the streets of Balaia, with the sea behind as if illuminated from the rear by a clear light bulb, how the gray-haired woman with an umbrella wedged under her arm and men's shoes hidden under the stained folds of her skirt, came suddenly from a thicket, muttering words no one understood from her lipless mouth, and began pushing the guy with the magazines along the floor of leaves and pine needles with a horrible squeaking of the wheels, as if conducting an inattentive child through the city, until they disappeared in the crease of a hill leaving only the groan of the wheels, like the smell of perfume in an empty bed. It was then (he thought) that he decided to become a psychiatrist in order to live among distorted men like the ones who visit us in dreams and to understand their lunar speeches and the agitated or rancorous aquariums of their brains, in which swim the moribund fishes of fear.

There were, therefore, the crazies of Benfica, the thin young man loaded down with cricket cages who chatted with the indifference of buildings inveighing against the closed windows, the guy masquerading as carnival barker directing traffic on a street corner, plethoric with energetic authority, the two old-maid sisters, as hook-nosed as cockatoos, daughters of a seaplane pilot whose picture in helmet and fur-trimmed jacket futilely threatened from the wall the cat's slumber, the sisters who on summer evenings invaded the churchyard from which departed the slow composure of the funerals, imitating with their dentures the clatter of propellers, trotting around the wagon like stumbling birds ready to rise above the trees in the faltering commotion of weary angels. He would never forget the coffins covered in black and gold cloth, whose sequins sparkled in the August sun like reflections in a pail, one of those à la minute beach pails where our face is drawn little by little on a piece of paper, or the family members who hid the lit joint behind their backs in an absurd ceremony, as if the cadaver would lift the lid to scream reproaches at them, never would he forget the silence of the doves during the funerals, nor especially the seaplane pilot's daughters who zigzagged over the acacias in awkward partridge bounds, their plastic incisors clacking in a bizarre imitation of engines.