PREFACE
We tend to believe that the crucial moments of our lives are those we share with family, friends, and even the applause of success. However, when the real turning points come, we are alone.
Tales of a Man All Alone is a collection of stories, somewhere between the real and the unreal, that explore experiences both men and women have to face all alone.
Thus, in Fernandez’s Experience, The Memory, The Water, a man finds, in the very reality surrounding him, a loophole through which he can reach the meta-reality of his own existence.
Both The House of Light, a symbolic story, and Teresinha, an everyday life story, are mystical experiences to which the characters have different responses.
The other stories, All Alone, Rodriguez, North Steppe, are realistic. When the time comes in their lives, their protagonists discover that they are alone and in this aloneness they must make a decision: to love, to survive or to die.
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FERNANDEZ’S LAST EXPERIENCE
Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else, that is the Infinite.
Khandogya, part 4, 24th Khanda
For years, Fernandez, an engineer and civil servant, had suspected that tedium ruled his life. With enviable punctuality, he would now get up without even looking at Marta, and, after a coffee standing in the kitchen, and the elevator that completed his wake-up with the jolts on the fourth floor, he would go out into the early morning street bustle, which he no longer noticed, because he himself was part of that bustle.
After exactly twenty-nine steps, counted daily in the course of fifteen years that had gone by in a flash, he reached the corner, crossed diagonally to the left and diagonally continued through the park. His life was true to the saying «from home to work, from work to home».
However, that December morning in 1983, as the media reported, a change lay in wait for him; an unimaginable change, and as such unlikely: he never reached the corner,