Certain roots

“The centuries passed over the village like birds, leaving their droppings. The centuries passed, dissolving the shadows of gallows, and sanitizing, and spreading their factory smoke over the landscape. For two generations, there was a certain radiance, that which they called progress, that is, The way forward, as if such a direction existed.”

Then the factory closed, the river dried up, and the bird of the century ended up delivering a monthly payment to people’s homes that was neither earnings nor income. It was a ghost that had everyone’s gratitude. For the winds of the time did not let them starve, although some died, in the mountains, of cold.

They were not all old, but what they had in common was their indifference to tribal pleasures, to drinks, to raucous games. Some painted the rainbow in the chapel because they supposed that sexualizing such a place would make them enthusiastic, dancing with great obscene effusions. But it was asking too much of feelings. There was no longer faith for blasphemies. The chapel kept its altar, which served as a counter for the beers whose old taste they had grown to dislike. They quickly grew tired of it.” [From “Certain Roots”]

It would be good if the Camões Prize, which was awarded to her in 2015, contributed to drawing attention to the work of Hélia Correia, an author averse to the spotlight and one of the great voices of contemporary Portuguese literature.

Hélia Correia (1949) is a contemporary Portuguese writer. She graduated in Romance Philology and is a secondary school Portuguese teacher. Despite her taste for poetry, it is as a fiction writer that she is recognized as one of the revelations of Portuguese novella writing of the 1980s generation, although her short stories, novellas, or novels are always imbued with poetic discourse.