The forgetfulness has the delicacy of forgetting even one's own reflection as a defense mechanism, where one declaims that sort of simulated soliloquies as thoughts that are transmitted to our reflection. That is the most difficult interpretation before our own inquisitive gaze. It may be that it is about that, a necessary erasure to be able to look at us without an iota of remorse or guilt, otherwise capable of murdering us in life.
An old retired theater actress is convalescing in a bed in a Lisbon flat. Alzheimer's progresses relentlessly and your body admits defeat, while your mind tries to survive the rhythm of the last chaotic jolts of memory. They are memories that resurface, dispersed, heterogeneous, fragments to which he clings to cover his altered conscience: episodes of his childhood in the Algarve, moments of tenderness and happiness with his parents, the small and great miseries of his successive marriages and the humiliations that had to happen to make a place in the world of theater.
After having given voice to so many characters on stage and having experienced so much, there remains only a fragmentary identity that at times is diluted and confused with other voices from the past and present. In this masterful novel, the great narrator of Portuguese letters unfolds the multitude of stories that this woman's life contains and superimposes them with free impudence, while weaving an infinity of threads between characters, times and different voices that, thanks to an impressive virtuosity, they make up an amalgam composed of memory and time that inexorably advances.
You can now buy the novel «For the one who is waiting for me sitting in the dark», by Antonio Lobo Antunes: