The German cook

“I did tell him, yes, I told José. I told him that I had seen him, that he had come after me, and José didn’t think much of it. Perhaps I didn’t want him to understand what I was saying to him so calmly, in such a neutral tone. I knew very well that he was listening absent-mindedly, thinking of other things. I don’t know what he was thinking about. Nor do I know what he thought about his whole life, because I think that beneath the irony there must have been something else. Something. That land still holds the heat. But he didn’t notice a thing, or didn’t want to know.”

I cannot help but hear Gertrude Stein in the distance.

In a country house, on an estate in a reinvented Beira, with the distant war as a backdrop, characters marked by hardship and helplessness confront one another. Like musical themes that emerge, disappear, and return, their destinies influence each other obsessively, guided by desire and ambition.

Mafalda Ivo Cruz is a Portuguese writer, translator, and essayist. Her work is distinguished by the search for an emotional truth. In Pequena Europa, she confirms herself as one of the most elegant and intense voices in contemporary Portuguese literature. She is the author of Um Requiem Português (1995), A Casa do Diabo (2000), O Rapaz de Botticelli (2002, Pen Club Fiction Prize), Vermelho (2003, APE Grand Prize for Fiction in 2004), Emma (2004), and Oz (2006).