The promise

“Like Scheherazade with King Shahriar, I somehow told stories to death so that it would spare my life and the lives of those I loved; stories that seemed to have no end.”

On a ship, a woman falls into the sea. Adrift, she sees her entire life pass before her eyes and promises Saint Rita, patron saint of impossible causes, to write her story if she survives. People, places, and memories flood back to her, like wreckage bobbing on the water, in an unfathomable and threatening ocean, forming a powerful dictionary of recollections. Published posthumously in 2011, A Promessa underwent constant rewriting since the 1960s and was the work of the author’s final days, as she was already tormented by illness.