Bastardy

“Moses felt the strange stirring that had unsettled his uncles. In the kitchen, the women returned to the silence with which they had initially received him. And the conversations in the stables, with the days being so short, were becoming more hurried.”

He could hardly get the customers to talk about the sea. However, he had already grown accustomed to feeding on his own thoughts. He imagined the day he would meet that great blue expanse, stretching out like a meadow in bloom. The obsession had taken hold of him as if someone had kidnapped him.

Everything he saw and heard was filtered, framed by his own perspective. He trusted that his uncles would take him to Vieira sooner or later. He did not think that, with that kind of work, they did not enjoy the pleasures of summer, when the demand for horses and open carriages was at its peak.»

It would be good if the Camões Prize, awarded to her in 2015, helped draw attention to the work of Hélia Correia, an author who shuns the spotlight and one of the great voices of contemporary Portuguese literature.

Hélia Correia (1949) is a contemporary Portuguese writer. She holds a degree in Romance Philology and is a secondary school Portuguese teacher. Despite her love of poetry, she is recognized as a fiction writer and one of the leading figures of the 1980s generation of Portuguese novelists, although her short stories, novellas, and novels are always imbued with poetic language.